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Comment by smohnot | Hacker News Reader

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-poker-playing-supercomput... Lost by $732,713, with $170 million bet... pretty close. But you're right, a victory by a chip will be declared a win

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That's both an unfair slight to the ethics of the researchers involved, as well as inaccurate. They've published in advance their criteria for declaring a victory vs a tie: http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/21215-poker-bot-doubles...

which is: "If after 120,000 hands either Libratus or the humans are one standard deviation above break-even, they will have won the competition with “statistical significance.”"

(I'm a professor at CMU, but I have nothing to do with this research or competition.)

we mostly mean by the media. Story if they barely lose "Poker bot statistically ties pros". Story if they are one chip up: "Poker bot leads/beats pros"

One standard deviation is not enough to declare that one strategy is better than another.

also important to note they made the players play thousands of hands over weeks and many said how they played in a way to shorten the time they had to play. thereby not necessarily showing their "true" skill.

> also important to note they made the players play thousands of hands over weeks

To your point, I wonder how they account for mental and physical fatigue. To a computer it makes no difference to play thousands of hands over such a long period of time or hundreds of hands over the course of a single day. Humans on the other hand don't have the same attention span as a computer.

not to mention that people play differently with fake money than real money.

On the Twitch Stream, Jason Les "promises" that "even though this is not real money" it really matters to him.

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