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Online Poker Playing Robots
Online poker has become enormously popular in recent years. Some estimates put the daily turnover of poker playing websites in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Enthusiastic players can be found in all walks of life, and no doubt a good number of players have been able to make a living or pay their way through college on their winnings. By any measure, online poker has become a huge business.
But how would you feel if your opponent was an automatic poker playing software robot?
A far fetched idea? Well, no.
In July 2006 the first American Association for Artificial Intelligence Computer Poker Competition took place. Six poker bots fought it out. Hyperborean, a package written by artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta, came out on top. All six competing poker software packages performed creditably.
Computer processing power is no longer a constraint. The question now is finding a way to have the software deal with the uncertainty, bluff and deception that is part of the game of poker. Perhaps surprisingly, the brilliant mathematician John Von Neumann worked through the decision making processes of poker a long time ago, and presented his findings in the 1940s as mathematical game theory. Poker playing software uses game theory to make its poker playing decisions, and is getting better at it all the time.
However, at the World Poker Robot Championships in 2005 there was a reality check. Leading poker player Phil Laak took on the two top software packages, and won.
Most of the known research into poker playing robots is taking place in universities. But think for a moment about the potential payoff for an unscrupulous commercial robot, especially to play less skilled players in lower stake games where it is less likely to be noticed.
How could you tell whether you have played such a robot already?
You might think leading poker players like Phil Laak live up to the term "poker face" and give away few human emotions. But a computer has no emotions to display at all. That could be a giveaway: a fast responding, relentless, tireless and unemotional opponent that won a lot of hands would soon seem to be less than human.
Now think about the possibilities of building in human weaknesses and foibles to the software, to make the robot lose or make mistakes from time to time. Not too often, mind, but enough for it to seem human as a player. Such a robot would be hard to detect, and is quite practical to program.
Top online poker players may have little to fear from poker playing robots yet, but most other players would be wise to keep an even more wary eye on their anonymous opponents than usual. The poker playing robot era may be just around the corner, and could radically change the way the game is played.
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