Writing a bot for college credit

[jab630]

My friend and I are doing an independent study with the goal of designing a really smart poker bot. This is for academic purposes only. We are not looking to write a bot that can play on sites like partypoker. Rather, we are looking for a bot-friendly online poker medium that provides a dealer and an interface that would be easy for a bot to use (i.e. text-based). That way we could concentrate on the interesting part (playing good poker) rather than waste time writing our own server and interface. IRC poker would have been ideal, but apparently it's been defunct for some time now. Does anyone know if anything has emerged to replace it?
Thanks,
Josh

[jman220]

[ QUOTE ]
My friend and I are doing an independent study with the goal of designing a really smart poker bot. This is for academic purposes only. We are not looking to write a bot that can play on sites like partypoker. Rather, we are looking for a bot-friendly online poker medium that provides a dealer and an interface that would be easy for a bot to use (i.e. text-based). That way we could concentrate on the interesting part (playing good poker) rather than waste time writing our own server and interface. IRC poker would have been ideal, but apparently it's been defunct for some time now. Does anyone know if anything has emerged to replace it?
Thanks,
Josh

[/ QUOTE ]

zone.com has play money poker. Probably yahoo games too.

[Eratosthenes]

The university of alberta (use google, I'm too fat and lazy to find the link for you) has a free poker site for just this. They publish the interface so you don't have to reverse engineer the interface to a commercial site. u of alberta are the guys that wrote the poki and sparbot bots. There is also some MS theses and stuff on the site that you should find helpful.

[pokerjedi]

aol i think has poker
thebike.com

[Terry]

Some of the Zoo inhabitants who don't get out very much might be interested in the crossposted thread in the Software forum.