Bots and the future of online poker

[RIIT]

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Bot technology is improving.

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It's really not, FWIW. I'm pretty sure that 99% of what you see now could have been done 30 years ago.

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Hmmm? 1977? You may want to change your 30 to a 20. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[disjunction]

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Bot technology is improving.

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It's really not, FWIW. I'm pretty sure that 99% of what you see now could have been done 30 years ago.

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Hmmm? 1977? You may want to change your 30 to a 20. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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I just meant the algorithm. Really I meant 100 years ago, or whenever probability was invented. I'm saying that there are papers published about poker algorithms and "game theory" yada yada, and there are poker bots, but my impression is that neither has much to do with the other, because the papers are in la-la land.

[Victor]

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If anyone were able to program a bot to beat poker, why would he bother? He should be able to beat the game himself.

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if i write a bot im sure it would play better than me (tilt notwithstanding.) i would bet on it.

[BuddyQ]

"The Robots" by Kraftwerk

We're charging our battery
And now we're full of energy
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots

We're functioning automatic
And we are dancing mechanic
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots

Ja tvoi sluga, (I'm your slave)
ja tvoi Rabotnik (I'm your worker.)

we are programmed just to do
anything you want us to
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots

we're functioning automatic
and we are dancing mechanic
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots

Ja tvoi sluga, (I'm your slave)
ja tvoi Rabotnik (I'm your worker.)

Ja tvoi sluga, (I'm your slave)
ja tvoi Rabotnik (I'm your worker.)

[repeat to fade]
We are the robots

[disjunction]

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If anyone were able to program a bot to beat poker, why would he bother? He should be able to beat the game himself.

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if i write a bot im sure it would play better than me (tilt notwithstanding.) i would bet on it.

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Victor there are just so many little rules that you know, but you don't know you know. What's a dry flop and what's a drawy flop, for instance.

[HOWMANY]

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I have no weakenss exept eaty and sleepy

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my only weakpoint is hungry and sleepy

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God you guys are horrible. I can't believe I'm the only one that has this bookmarked:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...rue#Post5868027

[Victor]

disj, not sure if you are agreeing with me or not but what you say is my point. bots can evaluate how dry a flop is relative to a hand range far better than i can. imagine if i had an hour to make every decision. i would run pokerstove and play perfectly against my opponents estimated range. big advantage imo. a bot could go even further bc it wouldnt have to estimate the range. bigger advantage.

[gumpzilla]

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there is no way bots can handle a real player in NL, keep dreaming. how will it make decisions based off so little information?

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Why do you think it will have little information? For that matter, what information do you feel is available in limit that is not in NL? The bot can play with a HUD even better than you can, as it doesn't need to constrain which chunks of the database it will look at to what will fit nicely on a screen, and it can think about these things much faster, so it can process more of that information in comparable time.


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basically the bots wont be able to adapt as quickly, and whatever algorithm it bases its decisions off of will be highly exploitable. Either it will be highly bluffable, unbluffable and highly value bet vulnerable or it will be a random variance surfing spewbot

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I would expect bots to be less exploitable than typical humans, since if you're going to the trouble of programming a bot, you might as well throw some game theory in there for mixups. EDIT: Furthermore, I think it would be quite easy to program a bot to figure out who the winning players were based on datamining and then either a) avoid sitting with those players, or b) sit with them, but avoid playing big pots with them. Then the bot can just focus on picking off the fish where it doesn't even really have to worry about mixing up too much.

I think programming a bot would be pretty interesting/fun, but I think the temptation to "try it out" after building one would be strong.

[gumpzilla]

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disj, not sure if you are agreeing with me or not but what you say is my point. bots can evaluate how dry a flop is relative to a hand range far better than i can. imagine if i had an hour to make every decision. i would run pokerstove and play perfectly against my opponents estimated range. big advantage imo. a bot could go even further bc it wouldnt have to estimate the range. bigger advantage.

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I agree with your general theme here. That said, the bot is still always going to be estimating ranges based on the data it already has. It would probably do a pretty good job just matching up VPIP/PFR with positional information to likely ranges that fall in those percentages, but it will miss things every now and then. I don't see much reason to think that it would do worse than a person, if you did that right, though.

[disjunction]

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disj, not sure if you are agreeing with me or not but what you say is my point. bots can evaluate how dry a flop is relative to a hand range far better than i can. imagine if i had an hour to make every decision. i would run pokerstove and play perfectly against my opponents estimated range. big advantage imo. a bot could go even further bc it wouldnt have to estimate the range. bigger advantage.

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I am definitely not agreeing with you, although I admit that I am not that confident in my point.

My point is this: programs aren't magic, if you can say what you want the program to do, then you can program it. But the problem is, you can not say what you want it to do. When you start to get specific, you will find that you have problems.

For instance, you steal-raise from the button, and the BB calls. The flop comes, he checkraises. What does he have? Well maybe that depends on whether the flop is K62 rainbow or 987 single-suited. If the former, then maybe he is using a different rule for checkraising. Maybe his range depends on the fact that he is estimating what your range is, and he thinks he can blow you off of a hand on the dry flop. So it's not enough to merely enumerate hands, say that he'll checkraise on any pair or draw, and estimate your equity. You need to do something more. It's easy to screw up, and I don't know if it's possible to do a great job. I've told the story before of playing a bot at the AAAI competition, and I could bluff-raise it with air on any dry board. I changed my range so that its computations were useless. If the programmer fixed this, he might introduce a new problem.

As for the state of the art, I've only gone to one talk and skimmed a paper or two, and not from the best bots, but what I was gathering was that publishable papers are weak from a poker standpoint. They abstract away information that you need. Maybe they can prove 5% of optimal or whatever but a poker player can drive a truck through that 5%. So you're left trying to encode things rule-by-rule, but when you actually try to do it, it's not that easy. Flop texture, opponent profiling, thinking one step ahead to the turn and river, even the ramifications of backdoor straight draws would be a pain in the neck. I have learned to be very wary of programs that sound easy when you wave your hands, but not when you sit down to write them. I'm sure you can cook up something to beat fish, but I'm not sure that you can rigorously describe, let alone program, a bot that can beat yourself.