Hacker News Reader

6. I'm a mediocre programmer at best but could easily write a chess program that, with infinite processing power, would be perfect.

Yeah, IF you had infinite processing power, it would be a nearly trivial exhaustive search program. IF I had a way to read my opponents emotions, etc like humans can, then I could write a fairly trivial program to do well at poker. But those are two very big "IF"s.

The problem is the two games are very different. Chess is a game of perfect information, where both players know the entire state of the game. Poker is not, plus it has an element of chance.

You can't really compare the two.

I'd say you can in terms of how knowledge plays a role in the game. In chess, the computer can calculate the best move given a situation. It doesn't need to know anything about the opponents strategy. In poker, it is pretty much the opposite. Your move depends partially on purely deterministic criteria, what people likely have, but more so on what you think everyone else thinks. Here you enter a realm I'd say computers are inherently bad at.

This, I think, is what mattmaroon is getting at.

What I meant was you can't really compare the "easiness" of the two for humans based how well a computer would do. Computers are theoretically good at chess, and theoretically bad at poker, but that says nothing about how easy or hard the two are for humans.

You can't say that A is easier than B for humans just because a computer can do A well but not B. For example, computers are excellent at doing large calculations very fast but terrible at recognizing objects in a scene visually, but humans are the exact opposite.

> You can't really compare the two

I'll still try. Both games have a philosophical and a computational side. The chess philosopher could ask questions such as

"everyone knows that dominating the centre is an advantage, but WHY EXACTLY is that the case"

But even if he understands this better than others, it won't help him that much because chess games are decided on the computational side. This is why you have to start at an early age in order to become a great chess player. And it suits computers.

Poker's computational side includes, for example, odds (trivial) and ICM. In most forms of poker, though, it is far outweighed by the philosophical side, at least as of today. The poker philosopher could ask questions such as

"everyone knows that being in position is an advantage, but WHY EXACTLY is that the case"

If he's willing to work hard on his understanding of the game, he might, in theory, learn the rules at any age and become the world's best poker player in just a few years. Getting direct monetary value from one's philosophical insights is an attractive proposition. Unfortunately there are big psychological drawbacks, which Matt Maroon describes so well.

I am not the parent, but:

1. Subjective, with a nice insult thrown in there.

2. Do you really think the simplest form of poker for a bot would be a No Limit game?

3. Are you implying poker bots don't take opponents possible hands into account? wrong

5. No reason to cast doubt, chess has had much more effort put into it. Polaris has been in the works for 17 years, not 26. Compared to over 50 years for chess engines.

6. I don't think writing any chess engine is easy, but your main point, yes chess is a finite game. A computer isn't expected to win every time at rock, paper, scissors, so why poker? Like blackjack, there is a certain amount of available information, and poker bots can make the best play off that.

7. Amateurs with 1 year of poker under their belt win a WSOP bracelet.

2. Heads up no limit, yes. A player who simply pushed all-in every hand would only lose something like 45% against another player using optimal strategy, and would actually be a long term winner against more players than you'd think. I could write that bot.

3. They may, but they do a very poor job of it.

6. A computer can easily tie at roshambo, and the roshambot beats most humans in the long run. And poker is much different and far more complex than blackjack. The two arent comparable at all.

7. Irrelevant. I never contended that a bot couldn't win a tournament. They probably have. That's not really a good measure of ability.

I have actually programmed game AI and I can say none of your arguments is convincing. It is a very bold claim you are making, with very little to support it.

indeed.

Chess and poker are fundamentally different problems. Unfortunately this argument is going to come down to arguing about the definition of "complex" and things like that.

But I will still reiterate these points:

1. A great deal more effort has gone into computer chess than computer poker. When that amount of effort is put into computer poker, computers will be better than humans at poker.

2. The argument can be made that poker is harder or more complex than chess for computers, but the opposite is definitely true of humans today. If you don't study chess hard from the age of ten and then dedicate your life to it starting in your teens, you can't be the best. The amount of study (not playing) is probably an order of magnitude difference. In practice this means that any great chess player could switch to poker, study hard, play hard, and have a chance at making it, but no great poker players could switch to chess.

Fundamentally, sports in which real money is gambled will probably never reach the competitive level of play of non-gambling sports. Chess has a rating system and is setup so that the players of similar calibar play each other. Contrast this with poker where professionals are always actively seeking to play against worse players (with higher bank rolls).

1. I disagree, as do the few people I've met who work on it. 2. The dedication required is, in large part, due to the number of people who study the game, social attitudes towards it, and the wealth of information available. It has nothing whatsoever to do with complexity.

Poker is far more competitive than chess. Show me a chess game that runs every night with buy-ins in the hundreds of thousands.

The poker bots out there mostly suck because they don't need to be great to win lots of money from the weak players. The real problem the bots face is getting around anti-bot security measures.

But, although almost no effort has been put into poker bots, they're already pretty damn close:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/07/25/289607.asp...

If poker bots analyzed a massive database of how pros play like humans or the chess bots do then I'm certain that the poker bots would blow you away.

> No poker bot ever made could come anywhere close to me in...

You'll be seeing this quote again:)

The poker bots right now are also only good at heads up.

>The poker bots out there mostly suck because they don't need to be great to win lots of money from the weak players.

That's dumb. They'd win 5x the money if they were great.

>You'll be seeing this quote again:)

I meant made yet, maybe I should have specified. I've no doubt that computers will one day overtake humans. It just is nowhere near having happened yet.

2. The game was limit holdem, which is easier for a computer to solve than no-limit.

I'm pretty sure it's much harder when heads up.

Limit is definitely easier to solve in a standard ring game. Why would limit be more difficult to solve than no-limit heads up?