Poker Bot Battles Humans to a Draw

NBC: A poker showdown between professional players and an artificial intelligence program has ended with a slim victory for the humans — so slim, in fact, that the scientists running the show said it’s effectively a tie .The event began two weeks ago, as the four pros — Bjorn Li, Doug Polk, Dong Kim and Jason Les — settled down at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh to play a total of 80,000 hands of Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold ’em with Claudico, a poker-playing bot made by Carnegie Mellon University computer science researchers.

…No actual money was being bet — the dollar amount was more of a running scoreboard, and at the end the humans were up a total of $732,713 (they will share a $100,000 purse based on their virtual winnings). That sounds like a lot, but over 80,000 hands and $170 million of virtual money being bet, three-quarters of a million bucks is pretty much a rounding error, the experimenters said, and can’t be considered a statistically significant victory.

The computer bluffed and bet against the best poker players the world has ever known and over 80,000 hands the humans were not able to discover an exploitable flaw in the computer’s strategy. Thus, a significant win for the computer. Moreover, the computers will get better at a faster pace than the humans.

In my post on opaque intelligence I said that algorithms were becoming so sophisticated that we humans can’t really understand what they are doing, quipping that “any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity.” We see hints of that here:

“There are spots where it plays well and others where I just don’t understand it,” Polk said in a Carnegie Mellon news release….”Betting $19,000 to win a $700 pot just isn’t something that a person would do,” Polk continued.

Polk’s careful wording–he doesn’t say the computer’s strategy was wrong but that it was inhuman and beyond his understanding–is a telling indicator of respect.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed