[marv]

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I thought it was common knowledge that the only reason computers can't dominate multi-handed poker games is due to computing power. The search trees in heads up limit hold 'em are still gigantic, however programs exist that crush most players. The UC Alberta site has such programs and have posted results against a player whom they state is "world class." If you read their research, they state that computing power is the bottleneck which prohibits multi-game world class poker programs. Nothing more.

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This is simply untrue.

The state of the art techinques for HU don't apply to multiplayer games since multiplayer equilibirium finding can't be expressed as a linear programme. You can find near-optimal strategies for 2 and 3 player limit using other solution techniques (which are slower than solving an LP) but not for 4 player and no-way-in-hell for 6 players or more.

People vastly underestimate how hard it is to write a bot which can construct a model of its opponents play accurately enough to exploit it (except for really poor opponents). Saying "its easy, just use pokertracker ... fuzzy logic ... blah blah" have cleary never tried, nor are familiar with the published work on the subject. Even mediocre humans are currently far better at figuring out how to exploit their opponent than the state of the art modelling bots.

A good game theory bot built using current techniques played against a state-of-the-art opponent modeller will crush the opponent-modeller, even over hundreds of thousands of hands. The UofA learnt this the hard way after their bot Poki-X (a combination game-theory/opponent-modeller bot) was defeated in a very public competition by another bot, and then by a well known pro, so in the recent AAAI pokerbot competition they just mixed two game-theory bots rather than even try to exploit its opponent. And they won, convincingly.

Unlike chess/backgammon, game theory (which is just minimax for complete information games) is not the full answer to how to write a pokerbot. The reason? Even a perfect game-theory pokerbot, though unbeatable in the long term will make very little against a reasonable competant player. Against anyone even close to expert, the bot will have essentially no edge whatsoever. This is the difference between chess and poker.

More mythbusting: HU NL Holdem is not actually that much harder than HU limit. Most HU NL games don't involve may different raise amounts, and usually have far fewer raises than HU limit. The tree is bigger, and you have to solve a different tree for each depth, but it's not hard to write game-theory NL bots which are actually quite sound (far better than the UofA's NL bots), but they are definitely not as good as their limit counterparts.

Marv