[jjshabado]

As a Computer Science grad I know that this "No field have ever overrated their potential advancement more than the AI field. Ever." is a stupid statement.

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Virtually none of the great things promised have become part of everyday life.

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I'm not talking about the flying-car type promises made 30 years ago. I'm talking about the fact that there has been steady and significant progress in the field of AI game playing for the past 2 or 3 decades. There is a lot of very promising and interesting research being done in AI now. To think that this progress is just going to stop is naive. I'm not talking about the next 2 or 3 years. I'm talking about the next 5-20 years. Maybe it'll be on the near end, maybe the far, but either way Poker AI will be advanced enough to beat the vast majority of online players.

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. In 2007, AI cannot even replace a telephone operator.

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Actually, its pretty close. And the fact that you think this is a relevant example shows that you really haven't thought too much about bots. Why is replacing a telephone operator with a machine hard? Because of the interface. The actual job being performed is trivial for a computer. Its making machines process/decode/replicate the human voice and language that is hard. A Poker bot needs a very narrow interface. It just needs to be able to get its cards, the board cards, and the action. All of this needs to be presented to the human users in a reasonable way ( who's going to play poker at a site that uses squiggles everywhere to obscure suit values? ) and that means its not that hard for a bot to get that information for processing.