[Snoogins47]

The "Deus Ex Machina" post ruled.

The NL vs FL discussion is pretty silly too. I could possibly see some reasons why NL may be more "complex" in this sense than FL: there is simply a wider range of informatino available, and a wider range of options to take. In FL, deriving the "best" strategy based on given information only requires comparisons of three decisions (well, this may branch out farther when you're including later streets) but essentially, an ordering of the profitability of "raise" "call" and "fold" will generally be all you need. This limited action also probably (I would imagine) amounts to better 'reads' more quickly, since we will have a lot more examples of "Player X raised the turn on such a board" than we will "Player X min-raised a 1/3rd pot size bet on the turn on such a board" with which to assess.

However, as anything, it comes down almost purely to semantics, and game structure. Despite the seemingly "more complex" nature of NL, I am firmly convinced that, if I had the programming knowledge to implement it (my 'coding' experience ended when I got my first computer that didn't come with QBasic) I could probably write a bot that could beat the small NL games online. I'm almost CERTAIN I could write a bot that would beat the small NL SNGs. Most decent players here could probably do the same. On the other hand, I'm not very confident in my ability to write a bot that could, say, beat a $1/$2 game. (note, by "write a bot" I really mean "write a successful rote strategy," not necessarily write the program itself... I want to stress that. I wouldn't know the first thing about actually coding a bot, but I could throw together pseudo-code to outline the 'strategy' that the bot uses.)

It may be harder to write a 'perfect' deep-stacked NLHE bot than a perfect FL bot, I don't really know. My gut tells me that it would be a LOT easier to write a "winning" NL bot, than a winning FL bot.

The game structure is important too. A very short-stacked NL game makes for easier "botting" than a deep-stacked one.

The "emotion" aspect somebody mentioned is somewhat interesting to think about. I think that were a bot to exist that had a lot of information about opponent play in the past, more weight would have to be given to more recent information... possibly a sort of sliding scale. There would also almost HAVE to be some sort of "override," where the computer could recognize that the opponent is playing significantly differently than he has in the past. If we made this too sensitive, a decent run of cards could trick the computer into reacting to a "tilting" opponent. If it's not that sensitive, we have a very slow 'reaction time' that will cause headaches if our opponent is playing drastically differently than he normally does. I wouldn't be shocked if humans tend to pick up on this much more quickly than would be feasible for a computer.