Humans Defeat Poker Playing Computer
Complete 2007 WSOP stats at the Poker Prof's World Series of Poker 2007 Information Page. Poker from behind the WSOP Curtain from Dr Pauly of Tao of Poker.
Phil "Unabomber" Laak and Eli Eslami have been involved in a 4 session heads up poker match against the best poker playing bot to date. Polaris is the Artificial Intelligence poker playing masterpiece from the minds at the University of Alberta. It is currently in Vancouver Canada as one of the feature events of the annual global conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
With computers now capable of playing and winning against human competitors in chess and checkers, would a semiconductor brain be capable of mastering the intricate physiological factors of poker? Polaris is actually ten different poker playing programs integrated into one system that is controlled by another program called "Coach" that selects which of the ten program to use.
The format was $10-$20 Limit Texas Hold'em played in 4 matches of 500 hands each over two days. Both Laak and Eslami would play Polaris from isolated locations that allowed for the hands dealt to one of the players to be dealt to the computer in the other match. This method was used to remove as much of the "luck factor" as possible.
The Day 1-Match 1 was actually won by Polaris with a slim $70 margin. The Day 1-Match 2 was won by the computer with a $635 showing. Day 2-Match 1 was won by the humans with $1455 giving the Laak/Eslami team an $820 edge going into the deciding second match of Day 2. After the dust electrons had settled the live team collected another $570 in winnings to win the match and defeat the machine. Both Laak and Eslami said they had picked up on the playing habits of the bot and definitely had an advantage because the bot couldn't "learn" and change its play accordingly. They also used Poker Academy Prospector to track the bots play.
The poker playing bot has been around since 1991 and is steadily getting better and playing tougher. Its probably only a matter of time until one of the future Polaris generations takes down the human team. When that day comes what will Polaris do with the bracelet? Probably trade it for more ram or maybe one of those cute little Apple notebooks and a sweatshirt.
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