RoboPokers are Coming
13th November, 2007
It happened in chess with Garry Kasparov losing to IBM computer. It is now considered nearly impossible for a human to win computer in checkers, backgammon, scrabble, bridge and connect four. Therefore it is not surprising that there is a lot of interest from various groups and individuals to try and create a machine that would always win in poker, the one game everybody considered to be based around human abilities and skills that a computer will not be able to imitate. But will it be able to calculate them though?
Ian Ayres, a columnist in The New York Times, feels that online poker will very soon become a machine game, which is unbeatable by a normal human. "Online poker may become a suckers' game that humans won't have a chance to win", he stated.
The first Man-Machine Texas Hold ’Em Poker Championship in Vancouver, Canada, happened in July this year, in which the world’s two top players won the computer. One of the players, Phil Laak, after the match said this: "We won, not by a significant amount, and the bots are closing in."
Computer Poker Research team in the University of Alberta have been developing the program, called Polaris for over 16 years now and has a lot to show for the duration of the research. Aside from having basic strategic moves and possible tactics installed in its computer brain, the program can also adopt and learn by watching what mistakes the opponents are making, modifying the moves as the game goes along.
There are already other downloadable version of RoboPokers, such as Bluffbot and WinHoldem, but they would hardly stand against the world’s best players, nevertheless more likely to win most of the poker players out there.
Professor Jonathan Schaeffer, who was funding Alberta university project stated that there is a tremendous progress made and that the program can now deal with multiple players
