Arts and Ideas: Can "pokerbots" beat humans?
Brian Edwards of Jacksonville, Fla., is a mild-mannered website administrator for Blue Cross Blue Shield. He doesn't live in a mansion and keep thousands of dollars of cash on hand like many top poker players. Nor does he wear a wacky mask or special glasses, which some top players now do. He doesn't need to. Edwards has the ultimate poker face in his "poker robots": poker-playing programs that he codes in his spare time.
Edwards, 29, is one of a handful of engineers and programmers around the world who have responded to the online poker craze by creating robots. These bots log onto virtual poker tables masquerading as human players and play hand after hand, winning real money for their creators.
They're a controversial topic in the online poker world--most virtual casinos such as Partypoker ban robots and hire employees to try to weed them out. But this week, at the same time that the human World Series of Poker escalates to its well-publicized finale, the world's top programmers will come out of the closet, unleashing their poker-playing robots on one another in a 72-hour robot poker series called the Man Versus Machine Poker Championship. The winner collects $100,000 from sponsor GoldenPalace.com, an Antigua-based online casino (the same place that last fall famously paid $28,000 for a cheese sandwich that allegedly displayed a likeness of the Virgin Mary). The winner will also challenge the human winner of the World Series of Poker in a face-off that the sponsors hope will rival the drama of Garry Kasparov vs. IBM's Deep Blue but will more likely carry the punch of "Dancing with the Stars." Homegrown poker programs have not developed to the complexity of Deep Blue, and poker, a game of psychological maneuvers, bluffing, and incomplete information, is very different from chess.
Nevertheless, pokerbots are a threat to average human players because they can master a perfect mathematical approach to the game. And the artificial intelligence of these nascent poker robots may herald a big change in the way poker is played. Already, for example, backgammon-playing programs have developed strategies that permanently changed the way humans played the game.
Of the poker robot contestants, Edwards claims to be the only one who hasn't run his robot online against humans. "I really have no idea what I'm up against," he says. Like many other robot creators, Edwards classifies himself as only a midrange player and says in the two years he's been playing, he's about broken even.
His lack of expertise, however, isn't a liability in programming a poker robot. "Teaching a computer to play poker is different from teaching yourself. A human brain works with fuzzy knowledge and is able to make generalizations. Computers are better at being able to repeat simple tasks many, many times." For instance, a computer can play an opponent 5,000 hands and have perfect recall about what that opponent did in hand three.
"It's definitely possible to create a poker robot that plays better than yourself," says Edwards. If his bot wins the robot challenge, he thinks it might have a good chance against the human champion?but only to a certain point. "It all depends on the number of hands played. If a professional player played against my bot 5,000 to 10,000 hands, they'd be able to spot its weaknesses."
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