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Comment by noambrown | Hacker News Reader

I think the bot would make a lot of money playing against average recreational players, but it's absolutely true that if you can exploit bad players' weaknesses, then you can make more money than what the bot would earn.

We played 10,000 hands over 12 days in the 5 humans + 1 AI experiment. That's quite a long time, and there's no indication that they even began to uncover any weaknesses in that time period. So I'm fairly confident the AI is robust to exploitation, and I think that's a very important quality to have in any AI system.

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That 10,000 total hands number isn't particularly meaningful on the point of adaptability because the humans aren't sharing information with each other. The important number is how many hands each individual human played against the AI. Another question would be whether the pros knew which player was the AI? Because if they didn't, you are basically throwing a modified Turing Test against the pros before they can even begin to try to find tendencies in the AI. Predicting opponents is a huge part of how people play poker. If the AI plays unlike any human, pros are at huge disadvantage against an AI compared to how they would fair against a similarly skilled but more traditional human player.

None of this is meant to diminish what you all accomplished, I'm just highlighting areas of poker in which this AI would be less successful than humans even if it is more successful overall.

The humans knew the whole time which player was the bot.

There was an interesting IRL poker game a few years ago. The player who was running behind started going all in on every hand without even looking at their hand (with a huge amount of success).

Out of curiosity, how does a bot deal with oddities things like this?

This is a solved problem. Open-shoving is a feature of sit-n-gos, so of course people have simulated these and compiled so called "pushbot tables". The parameters are basically pot size and winning probabilities against a random hand.

While this particular bot may not have those programmed in, a more powerful variant eventually will.

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