[threeonefour]

[ QUOTE ]
FYI ALL,

5 years ago, Phil Laak and the Computer had a similiar match. Phil won the match, but estimated he had less than a 5% edge.

Proccessing power and memory limitations played a big part in the ability of the AI to run. Now 5 years both the technology and research have advanced tremendously.

I believe the computer has the slight edge this time around, and will win the tournament. In another 5 years the computer will be mostly unbeatable with maybe a dozen players or so standing a chance.

[/ QUOTE ]


i think power is much less of an issue in this case, than it is for say Chess. this is because Chess has been researched seriously by PHDs for years (like 40-50 years), whereas poker has gotten very little attention. i think most of the weaknesses of the program are almost certainly on the software side for now, and basically could be overcome very easily just by pouring more man hours and research dollars into the project.

there are literally thousands of chess engines that have been built from the ground up. i doubt there are even a a couple dozen functional poker engines that are beyond their initial development phases.

nothing should actually be that hard to calculate when it comes to poker anyway. you don't need to search 100 million board positions. you could probably run a million pokerstove type calculations in a second or two. i think coming up with an algorithm to determine your opponents range given his play is the most difficult problem. that isn't specifically difficult from the number crunching side but rather from algorithm development side. once you have a range, figuring out your equity and what your action should be based on that equity shouldn't be that hard.