Thu

Jun 16
2005

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Online Poker Played by Bots

I forwarded a recent slashdot link to an LA Times story on online poker bots to my cousin Peter Balka, who earned his way to his PhD by playing poker. The slashdot article claims, "many engineers also are trying to make bots that are good enough to play and beat human players for money in online casinos." Peter replied:

I strongly suspect that there are already more than a handful of first-generation bots currently playing internet Hold'em poker. The game is simple enough (and the players bad enough) that even the most rudimentary bots would undoubtably churn out a considerable profit by playing only premium starting hands on multiple tables at multiple sites 24/7.
 

Darse Billings, a student at the University of Alberta, has centred his PhD thesis on artificial intelligence on a poker Deep Blue he developed that he claims has been successful making money on the internet. [A copy of a National Post article on Billings' work is available from the University of Alberta website.] I have no reason to doubt his claim.

The major difference between Deep Blue and any poker equivalent is that, minor fluctations in day-to-day mental processing aside, chance or 'luck' does not play a significant role in chess, whereas it is the overriding short term factor in poker. For this reason, any results from a bot vs. bot or bot vs. professional tournaments I would certainly take with a grain of salt, just as I do the crowning of a new 'world champion' each year at the World Series of Poker. I would be more comfortable in drawing any kind of conclusions from such a tournament if the participants were to play the equivalent of 100,000 hands or so, not the 100 - 200 that they would typically see in the course of a tournament. I would equate any conclusions as to the best poker bot based on the results from this Poker Bot Tournament to my obtaining 3 heads in 5 tosses of a coin and concluding that my coin is biased.


tags:   | comments: 4   | Sphere It
submit:

 
Previous  |  Next

0 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/4112

Comments: 4

  Josh Dura [06.16.05 07:54 AM]

I am pretty sure I have seen one of these bots on UltimateBet. I was up late playing one night, when I came across a table where a player was playing VERY consistently the same way. Same bets, same canned chat responses, etc... Also, one key thing that always happened, was that this bot somehow disabled the "Hand History" function of the program, thus disabling people from seeing the history of hands the person/bot played.

Now, I am no where near a consipiracy theorist, so I decided to follow the guy through the UltimateBuddy program for the next couple weeks. These same canned responses, same bets, and disabled hand history kept happenening EVERY time I saw him. Whether or not he was a bot, hell, i dont know. I do know that 1) I made a good amount of money off of him, due to knowing its style of play, and 2) After complaining to UltimateBet about the player, I never saw him/it again.

If you are a smart poker player, you will easily be able to figure out the style of play of these bots, and should be able to turn it into an advantage. Although, the bot will probably still make money in the long run, due to people not realizing that it is a bot. Lets just hope this doesn't become a trend.

  Owen [06.16.05 01:52 PM]

There are several and here are some links....

http://www.thenextgames.com/
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6002298/
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/PokerLibraryAndBotChallan.asp
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fi-pokerbots12jun12,0,6050364.story?track=mostemailedlink


the last one references a tournament that has been set up specifically for bots - and includes interviews with several engineers who have been running their bots in real games

  Kevin Farnham [06.16.05 05:21 PM]

I have "invented" mathematical methods for achieving specific financial goals for a couple decades, my primary focus being the stock market. Real poker (played with friends) has one very significant advantage over the stock market with respect to application of AI techniques: no transaction costs. This is why almost all frequent trading stock market techniques fail (except in a 1999-2000 scenario where the NASDAQ is rising 90% annually).

Does online poker have transaction costs? If it does, then I think before long almost all of the AI programs will be subdued by transaction costs, once they start competing with each other. The result being great profits for the web site owner... which is why they built the site, right?

Meanwhile, poker sites are the primary spammers for any invitation I provide for people to enter text into my site! So, who's really making the money?

  Korakot Chaovavanich [06.18.05 08:30 PM]

More and more AI bots are entering human activities.
If such bots can gain financial support to maintain
itself, things will get scary. They won't need human
to operate them and will compete with human like we
read in science fictions.

What do you think these all will lead to?