What is it with people that think this kind of quip buys some sort of credibility? This is the second time today that someone has started a response with "Clearly, you have never...". I have played poker. I have also baked (reference to other thread).
Anyway, I don't buy what you're selling. It doesn't seem that it would be hard to make the computer be unpredictable, unless suddenly humans become good at figuring out the machinations of a pseudo-random number generator instinctively, and in real-time. Make the computer do irrational things at random intervals. The whole point is that a human player, not knowing what cards the computer has, will have little introspection into the computer's intended course of action. I suppose you could tell some things, depending on the rules of the game (i.e., if the computer traded 3 cards in a 5-card hand, you might assume he had a bad hand).
Essentially, it seems that you just said "it's easy to beat the computer if it plays stupid". That doesn't have anything to do with this. The computer can be both a perfect number cruncher and entirely unpredictable, and given enough dealt hands, I don't see how you could beat it.
The remark wasn't meant to establish my credibility, I was just saying you make elementary mistakes. My hunch is you have no experience playing poker. This doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it doesn't exactly work in your advantage.
Are you really saying that the computer doesn't need to use any psychology - and can become "world champion" just by playing a mathematically perfect game with some random bluffs thrown in?
You've got to be kidding me.
(Just for the record - I'm talking NL hold'em here. If you're talking about 5 card draw you have a point. As that game doesn't have the same opportunity for psychology)
Well, if it's any comfort, your hunch is correct. I'm not very experienced.
My observation, perhaps incorrect, is that poker outcomes are almost entirely based on psychological manipulation, not on probabilities - because people can be psychologically manipulated. In this regard, poker is like Risk. There's an element of probability, but it only rarely tends to dominate outcomes (I am an experienced Risk player). It's possible to write Risk-playing software that is very difficult to beat except in the rarest of circumstances where luck dominates, because you can't convince the computer to invade Asia or fortify in Australia when it would really be against his interests. I see poker in the same way.
Perhaps I'm over-trivializing the difficulty of writing such a system for poker, but I suppose in essence, I am indeed arguing that you could create software that could just ignore the psychological aspects of the game, and instead play a total numbers game, and that over time it should be a winner. I guess I can concede that if you don't ignore the psychological aspects and try to use them in formulating strategy, that would be very difficult indeed; I just don't see the point.
Let's suppose you're right - that playing by the numbers is sufficient. In this case you would not have to keep track of player histories, as you consider every hand without context. But this can only result in one thing: your play style will be constant. You will always take the best action with probability P and (semi)bluff with probability 1 - P. The human notices this and starts playing very aggressively. As a result the PC will fold winning hands and lose many blinds. What the PC should do is change tactics. Get aggressive or start laying traps (e.g. slowplay a great hand so it looks weak, to lure the aggressive human player into bluffing a lot of money).
If the computer always plays optimally from hand to hand it cannot deduce changes in playing style and will therefore always lose. From this I can only conclude that psychological aspects can never be ignored in poker.
Actually this is not correct. The perfect unbeatable game theoretical model actually doesn't take into consideration the history of the other player. There's maths and stuff by John Nash to prove this. The game theory perfect model will always play as if it is playing a perfect opponent.
In way you could say that the mathematically perfect player is so on guard against tricks by an opponent that even after 20 consecutive raises by an opponent it still doesn't alter its strategy. Of course the strategy will not lose just because a player raises once and consequently it also won't lose to a player who raises all the time. However by doing this the algorithm will miss out on substantial chances to exploit an imperfect opponent's weaknesses (in this case being way too aggressive). As a poker pro there is a (small) chance this 'perfect' player wouldn't even beat the rake against fish. However it would not lose (on average) to the best player in the world (and would probably win).
This might all seem to go against your intuition and experience as someone who is probably a really good poker player but it has been mathematically proven as part of game theory. Of course finding/creating this 'perfect' playing strategy is probably more complicated than 'solving' chess which most people believe to be impossible.
You're right. History doesn't matter and cannot possibly matter in a perfect game. After all, by using the same strategy for more than few hands the player gives information away unnecessarily. So in a perfect game people will switch tactics at any moment, which removes the history element altogether.
So the reason why changing tactics every hand is ineffective in the real world is because people believe that the way you played hands before gives information about your play in the future: your table image. But you only work on your table image in the first place so you can exploit it later. When playing against a perfect opponent you won't sacrifice opportunity to maintain an image, because the opponent will always play in the same way (the opponent knows you can change tactics at any moment).
However! The perfect strategy is still absolutely useless in a tournament and most other games. Because exploiting weakness and amassing chips is the objective for the first hours, and the perfect model is bad for that.
Still, it's all fascinating. Appreciate your explanation.
I never really meant that the calculations should be without context. One could keep a "running distribution" to update P (probably a bunch of Ps, actually) as you play.
Maybe we're now just looking at the same thing from different angles. You say "use psychology" and I say "use numbers", but in the end, maybe it's the same thing and it's harder than I'm giving it credit for.
Thanks for the poker lesson, by the way. Next time I see a game I'll be more interested.
Ah-hah. But that's the problem. So you need some kind of distribution for each of the different tactics the player plays. And then you need some heuristics to predict which tactic is going to follow which tactic. It's a slippery slope, I guess.
I don't know where to draw the line myself. It can be argued that as soon as something is modeled by a computer it ceases to be psychology and becomes mundane math. But I do still believe that most tactics people use to trick others with need to show up in the code in some way.
I won't use the "Clearly you've never done x" line again. It was cheap and uncalled for. Thanks for calling me out on that.
So psychology and math in poker are sort of two sides of the same coin. Generally, psychology means narrowing your opponent's range of possible holdings as much as possible, while preventing him from doing the same to you. You do this to enable yourself to make better math-based decisions, and cause him to make worse ones.
If you can accurately pinpoint your opponent's range, and predict how he'd react with the hands in that range on future rounds, the game becomes a rather trivial math problem for a computer. It can simply enumerate all of the possibilities and determine the correct course of action.
Unfortunately narrowing a person's range and predicting how they'd play in future rounds is very hard to do for a human, and presumably even harder for a computer.
What is it with people that think this kind of quip buys some sort of credibility? This is the second time today that someone has started a response with "Clearly, you have never...". I have played poker. I have also baked (reference to other thread).
Anyway, I don't buy what you're selling. It doesn't seem that it would be hard to make the computer be unpredictable, unless suddenly humans become good at figuring out the machinations of a pseudo-random number generator instinctively, and in real-time. Make the computer do irrational things at random intervals. The whole point is that a human player, not knowing what cards the computer has, will have little introspection into the computer's intended course of action. I suppose you could tell some things, depending on the rules of the game (i.e., if the computer traded 3 cards in a 5-card hand, you might assume he had a bad hand).
Essentially, it seems that you just said "it's easy to beat the computer if it plays stupid". That doesn't have anything to do with this. The computer can be both a perfect number cruncher and entirely unpredictable, and given enough dealt hands, I don't see how you could beat it.