----- Original Message -----
From: "steve uurtamo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "computer-go" <computer-go@computer-go.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 5:17 PM
Subject: Re: [computer-go] U. of Alberta bots vs. the Poker pros
There is certainly more money to be made in poker than in go.
Yes, but its also more difficult.
do you mean this in a casual, unsubstantiated way, or in an exact way?
Both.
Its probably not so difficult to make a simple bot. But it is also not
difficult to make a simple UCT player. But I am sure, that reaching the
level of Polaris is more difficult than writing the best Go-programm. I have
the feeling, that Polaris is a very serious project. Its certainly not
possible to beat it "out from nothing" like Crazy Stone and MoGo have beaten
the Go programms. There is also a lot of work in these 2 programms too and
it is not really "out of nothing". But its nevertheless not comparable to
the work the Billings-group has done. There is also a very large gap between
Polaris and the "rest". Without Polaris, everybody would say: Oh, its as
difficult as Go, the programms are in relation to humans at about the same
level. And now Polaris is strong and the argument is: This is because Poker
is much easier. No, they have done a better job.
In the exact way its comparing different things. The state space is in Go
larger, but Go is from the mathematical point of view in the trivial class:
Finite, Full-Information, 2 Players, Deterministic, Zero-Sum. Poker has a
random-player and hidden information. In the general case its an N-player.
Chess/Go... can be played in an autistic way. There is no need for an
opponent model. Just play the best moves. In poker one needs an opponent
model. The game-theoretic optimal strategy is only in special cases
sufficient.
The Polaris-Human match played also the most simple version. Heads-Up
Limited. Non-Limited is already much more complicated, because the implied
odds have a much greater variance. Or in other words: The opponent-model is
much more important in non-limited. In the N-persons version, the
state-space explodes too and in this case its not even clear, what a perfect
strategy is. I assume Polaris would not be able to be top ranked in the
Poker world-series. It would never come in the final round to play Heads-up.
The humans would also form a coalition to kick it out at the beginning and
"real" competition would start only afterwards.
Chrilly
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