What are you working on? July 2013

David_Gerard

This is the supposedly-bimonthly-but-we-missed-April-and-June-2013 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the supposedly-bimonthly-but-we-missed-April-and-June-2013 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

Trying to figure out why poker AI hasn't been solved (in the sense that chess AI has been solved).

Some great resources on poker AI: University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group. Papp 1998 in particular goes into detail about what makes it difficult, briefly: multiple opponents, imperfect knowledge, risk management, agent modeling, deception, and dealing with unreliable information. To these I would add the distinction between optimal and maximal play:

In chess AI, it never really matters what you expect your opponent to do like it does in poker. In chess, you just always try to move the board into the most favorable possible state. A win is a win... (read more)

9Nornagest13y

It's been a while since I looked into this, but when I did, the big problem was behavioral modeling. All the math in poker is local -- the state of the game in one hand influences the state of the game in the next only insofar as it affects the amount of chips players have on hand. That makes it easy to build a poker AI that'll wipe the floor with innumerate players. But in also narrows the scope enough that it's possible for more sophisticated human players to mentally solve for their probability of winning a given hand, or at least approximate it pretty well, and many do. An AI can't do much better than that with pure statistics, the only way to squeeze more comparative advantage out is for it to become better at gauging playstyle and hiding information about its own patterns of play than human players are. And that's a much harder problem than building a tree of possible moves in chess.

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What are you working on? July 2013

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What are you working on? July 2013

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