Your next opponent at the online poker, blackjack, or baccarat table may not be who you think. In fact, they may not even be human.
Could be a robot. A blood-thirsty, human-destroying robot. Nah, just kidding… or am I?
Evan Hurwitz and Tshilidzi Marwala, computer scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, have created a virtual player that can bluff at a card game they developed named lerpa. This virtual robot, a bot named Aiden, was created using artificial intelligence (A.I.) from a neural network algorithm that was originally made to forecast stock market fluctuations.
The programming of the robotic card game player
Aiden wasn’t programmed with the rules of the lerpa card game. So, the researchers had the bot play against three virtual players that just made random moves. Aiden was then dealt the cards and then was told what were the legal moves that could be played for each hand. Seems like the programming was a little off because Aiden didn’t play for the first 40 hands dealt and then tried just one hand and lost that one. He “learned” from that and refused to play another hand.
So then the scientists changed the artificial intelligence programming, forcing Aiden to play the first 200 card hands dealt. The bot began “learning” from his experiences. How Aiden would do it was by analyzing his win-loss history, opponent actions, and his cards as learning parameters.
Smart bot vs 3 other smart bots - who wins
Aiden, programmed with this new learning language, was then faced off against three other bots that were trained and programmed in a similar way. The researchers were eager to see how these card game bots would play against each other - since they all had that learning ability. “They began to develop their own personalities - either aggressive or conservative - depending on their past successes,” said scientist Evan Hurwitz.
Another one of the bots, named Randy, went into a long streak of consistent bad hands and folding on a regular basis. This bot actually decided to change strategy and play even when he had a bad hand - he started to bluff. Aiden, a cautious player, then changed his strategy by folding even when he had a strong hand.
“This demonstrates that computers can learn this peculiarly human behaviour,” said computer scientist Philippe de Wilde, from the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. “They generate the strategy from play, which is a very human way of learning.”
Robot conspiracy in the online casino world
Conspiracy theories abound in the online casino world, and this A.I. research won’t quell those ideas. Is it possible you’ve played against a bot on the internet?
“I hear this conspiracy theory about poker bots all the time,” said physicist Clément Sire from the Toulouse-based CNRS, which is the French national research organization. “Given the current state of poker bots, if you are losing to them you should be ashamed,”
Is this something for online casino aficionados - especially poker players - to worry about? Can a robot really make the right decisions in online play - and can they really bluff?
I don’t know if I buy the theory that there are automated poker playing computer agent bots in online casinos. Technology is definitely moving fast though. Can these robotic-players - if they exist - even have the ability to play well? I have a feeling even if there are robots in online play, they suck hard.
Poker vs chess - robot-style
I throw down an occasional chess game. And when I play against the computer - I get totally and completely walloped. I mean, I get destroyed. Annihilated. Utter destruction. And I think, “Damn, I just lost to a computer!” But see, in chess, we’re dealing with a board where each of the two players involved can see the whole chess board and can guesstimate what the other player might or might not do next. We can anticipate moves, and computers are real damn good at finding all the possible combinations of moves and choosing the best strategy available. But poker is a different deal. It’s a different animal, with different rules, and different ways to play. In poker, you’re playing a game that involves the players not knowing what the other players have in their hand. So, the existential question is - would a computer even “know” that it’s bluffing?
I’m getting a massive headache thinking of poker playing robots that can take over the world Terminator-style. Is that the next big thing, human vs robot poker tournaments of the future?
Robotic weirdness.
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December 19th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Hello! simply super resource
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