Told ya
Earlier, I said:
I’m betting on the man
Should be interesting. I can’t see a computer being bluffed off a hand or slow-played, which is important against a human.
In a match of wits between man and machine this week, a software program running on an ordinary laptop computer fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional human poker players.
The contest, which was billed as the “First Man-Machine Poker Championship” and which offered prize money totaling $50,000, pitted two professionals, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, against a program written by a team of artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta. They gave it a name that probably no gambler would ever choose as a nickname, Polaris.
Poker is thought to be a more difficult challenge for software designers than games like chess and checkers. Computer scientists have to develop different strategies and algorithms to deal with the uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player as well as difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing.
July 26th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
This was a given that the computer would lose; poker is a game of personality and character, not just logic. Back during the eighties I remember a Texan, Joe Bob Briggs saying that a computer could not beat a real poker player until it could develop a human personality, otherwise it could not understand the other players well enough to predict their behavior. I agreed with him then, and evidently he was right.
July 26th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
A computers beat man at chess. A computer beat man at checkers. This time around, man won at poker, but it is only a matter of time until computers are better… But you know what? Computers will never be better at kickboxing.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
As an avid poker player, I found this exercise quite interesting. The results are as I imagined they would be. Plenty of good players use math and logic but not the “gut”, the human factor. The point has been made, now put that computer to good use at Bodog!
August 20th, 2007 at 8:53 am
[…] What games can humans still win? Uhh, poker? […]