Live Updates of the Laak vs Computer Match HERE

[Herald]

Hey guys,

I've been following the posts in this forum over the last couple days, and I'm glad the initial response to the humans victory tonight is not that "of course the humans won". To be clear, I think the humans really benefited from a lot of information revealed by the bot team. If this was a fully competitive match, the humans might've been in tough since they wouldn't have known that the bot that they played in the last match was an equilibrium non-learning bot.

I hope you all enjoyed my blogging, and I'm also rather flattered that people are looking at my thesis. If you have questions about DIVAT, feel free to ask.

Morgan

[disjunction]

[ QUOTE ]
Hey guys,

I've been following the posts in this forum over the last couple days, and I'm glad the initial response to the humans victory tonight is not that "of course the humans won". To be clear, I think the humans really benefited from a lot of information revealed by the bot team. If this was a fully competitive match, the humans might've been in tough since they wouldn't have known that the bot that they played in the last match was an equilibrium non-learning bot.

I hope you all enjoyed my blogging, and I'm also rather flattered that people are looking at my thesis. If you have questions about DIVAT, feel free to ask.

Morgan

[/ QUOTE ]

Morgan,

Thanks for the great updates. I've been on these forums for a few years and the subject of bots come up a lot. I think the attitude tends to be the opposite of what you say. People tend to underestimate how tough the poker problem is for an AI. This frustrates me both as an AI grad student like yourself, and it also frustrates me as a poker player. I think I was pretty much the only person predicting a human win. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] If you would have won, everyone would have said, "Of course the bot won, I could write a bot too that would win if I had the time and inclination". And that is annoying.

A loss to 2 great players doesn't mean you guys didn't do great work. The competition is more of a referendum on the poker domain than on the particular bot. There are so many aspects to it, and just skimming the papers, it seems like there is a lot of interesting material. And of course the lessons learned in the poker domain will be of use to AI in general. Keep up the good work!

Edit: Oops, I meant UNDERestimate. Fixed.

[threeonefour]

Morgan,
do you plan on releasing any programs or source code relating to DIVAT? i know that this might not be the ideal application for it, but i could see myself using it on individual hands (or is the DIVAT number meaningless for such a small sample?) that went to showdown in heads up matches that i played. i think it could really give me a really good starting point for analysis, of course it would be way too burdensome to calculate by hand.

[Herald]

I'm up way too late here - just got back from hanging out with Phil and Ali after the match. Ali and his girlfriend Ana are both incredible people to talk to. They are smart, funny, and just awesome to hang out with. Believe me when I say, Ali really is an amazing poker player. He had the bot figured out in the last match, there is no doubt about that.

Someday, DIVAT will be available as a public service. It'll take some work, but someone will do it even if it isn't me. I have to figure out what exactly I'm doing with my life now that this competition is over. There are rumours that it'll happen again within a year. We'll see how it goes ... I might just stick around to be part of it again. Either way, I should really work on cleaning up the code and making it available either in web format or release some source. We'll see how it works out, but I certainly feel that the tool is powerful enough that it'd be worth the effort to make available through some means. I'll make sure to post to twoplustwo when/if this happens.

Morgan

[Dire]

Why publish the source code the bot rather than just the thesis/writeup regarding it? Just seems like the additional additional academic value gained is much less than the inevitable resultant abuse of the source code. Of course, not publishing it is likely just delaying the inevitable - but all the same.

[kidpokeher]

NY Times reported on the match - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/business/26poker.html

[pokergrader]

[ QUOTE ]
Why publish the source code the bot rather than just the thesis/writeup regarding it? Just seems like the additional additional academic value gained is much less than the inevitable resultant abuse of the source code. Of course, not publishing it is likely just delaying the inevitable - but all the same.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is very true. Opening up the source would undoubtedly cause your bot to be playing on real money sites on the internet in a short period of time, which is bad for everybody.

Also, the code is (presumably) so specific that the open source magic of software evolution probably wont result in your software getting any better because everything is so proprietary.

[Herald]

To be clear I'm talking about getting DIVAT ready for release in some form. I'm not sure if it'd be source code. Maybe it'd be usable as a public service. I'm not too sure at this point, but it's something that should be done.