Bots and the future of online poker

[geormiet]

Bot technology is improving. In 2 years, not only will the bots play better, they will become harder to detect.

Is it unreasonable to think that in a relatively short period of time a bot could be programmed that is virtually impossible to distinguish from a human player?

I've never thought of bots as a real threat to online poker itself, only to the opponents it wins from. However, in reading the posts of the past few days it seems that bots could easily be the biggest threat to online poker yet.

[samsdmf]

I have no weakenss exept eaty and sleepy

[timex]

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I have no weakenss exept eaty and sleepy

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my only weakpoint is hungry and sleepy

[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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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.

[sellthekids]

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I have no weaknesses except jerking off and sleepy

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FYP

[Injection]

[tendog]

bots sometimes disguise themselves as food for this exact reason.