[Copernicus]

I agree with AB, incomplete information has nothing to do with it. Humans and machines have the same constraint of II, so that can't possibly be the barrier to a winning poker bot.

In no-limit I would liken the problem to "graininess". A programming team can build a data base of all of the relevant information, and program the game at the 0th and 1st levels without encountering too much "graininess", and can probably become a decent player.

The problem as I see it is that the architecture of the program still needs a way to sort through all of the information and make a decision. The human brain is quite adept at recognizing patterns...those things that lead to "intuition". But just as a photograph that is focused on too closely loses context amidst the detail, and becomes an incoherent mass of grains, pixels or whatever you want to call it, poker thinking at the 2d level and beyond can get to bound up in the data.

Until there are machines built to learn the way the brain learns...multiple synapse/neuron trees linked with each new memory, I don't see a machine being able to balance the "big picture" and the data well enough to beat a full table of NL players.

Its more of a SMP topic, but obviously I don't think the Turning test has much validity.