Poker Pros vs. Smarter Computer - Who Will Win?

Top poker professional Phil Laak is playing a very interesting game of poker against a computer yesterday and today, where for a change, the computer is now good enough to challenge players like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004.

Computers already beat the best human players in backgammon, checkers and chess. Likely, you recall how IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov in their famous 1997 match.

But computers have not mastered the best human poker players- yet that is. But they are expected to champion even the best flesh and blood poker players within a decade. They can already beat virtually any amateur poker player.

"This match is extremely important, because it's the first time there's going to be a man-machine event where there's going to be a scientific component," said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer in a Yahoo! Sports article this week.

The Canadian university's games research group is considered the best of its kind in the world. After defeating an Alberta-designed program several years ago, Laak was so impressed that he estimated his edge at a mere 5 percent. He figures he would have lost if the researchers hadn't let him examine the programming code and practice against the machine ahead of time.

But this time around, the Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible.

Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami.

The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.

That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer's.

The two-day contest, which began Monday, is taking place not at a casino, but at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information.

"You don't have perfect information about what state the game is in, and particularly what cards your opponent has in his hand," Dana S. Nau, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park told Yahoo! Sports. "That means when an opponent does something, you can't be sure why."

As a result, it is much harder for computer programmers to teach computers to play poker than other games.

The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move. There isn't even a best strategy. A top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. He bluffs against the timid and proceeds cautiously when players who only raise on the strongest hands are betting the limit. He learns how to vary his own strategy so others can't take advantage of him.

That kind of insight is very hard to program into a computer. You can't just give the machine some rules to follow, because any reasonably competent human player will quickly intuit what the computer is going to do in various situations.

"What makes poker interesting is that there is not a magic recipe," Schaeffer said.

In fact, the simplest poker-playing programs fail because they are just a recipe, a set of rules telling the computer what to do based on the strength of its hand. A savvy opponent can soon gauge what cards the computer is holding based on how aggressively it is betting.

That's how Laak was able to defeat a program called Poker Probot in a contest two years ago in Las Vegas. As the match progressed Laak correctly intuited that the computer was playing a consistently aggressive game, and capitalized on that observation by adapting his own play.

Programmers can eliminate some of that weakness with game theory, a branch of mathematics pioneered by John von Neumann, who also helped develop the hydrogen bomb. In 1950 mathematician John Nash, whose life inspired the movie "A Brilliant Mind," showed that in certain games there is a set of strategies such that every player's return is maximized and no player would benefit from switching to a different strategy.

With game theory, computers know to vary their play so an opponent has a hard time figuring out whether they are bluffing or employing some other strategy. But game theory has inherent limits. In Nash equilibrium terms, success doesn't mean winning — it means not losing.

"You basically compute a formula that can at least break even in the long run, no matter what your opponent does," Billings said.

That's about where the best poker programs are today.

To go beyond, the mathematical power of game theory must be combined with the ability to observe an opponent's play and adapt to it.

Many legendary poker players do that by being experts of human nature. They quickly learn the tics, gestures and other "tells" that reveal exactly what another player is up to.

"The notion of forming some sort of model of what another player is like ... is a really important problem," Nau said. Computer scientists are only just beginning to incorporate that ability into their programs.

Days before their contest with Laak and Eslami, the University of Alberta researchers were still trying to tweak their program's adaptive elements. Billings will say only this about what the humans have in store: "They will be guaranteed to be seeing a lot of different styles."

Coming off the World Series of Poker so recently, this should be a different but very interesting match.

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