MAN VS. MACHINE (Update)

27 July 2007

Supremacy still undecided after three sessions

With one more 500 hand session to be played, the issue of whether human poker players are better than bots has yet to be decided.

Thus far, three of the four scheduled sessions have been played, with a technical tie called for the first session played Monday afternoon, Polaris winning the second session Monday and Phil Laak and Ali Eslami scoring a win during the Tuesday afternoon session.

The unusual contest is a University of Alberta project to pit man against its Polaris poker-playing research robot. Polaris is described by its university research team creators as the world's most advanced poker-playing computer program, replete with artificial intelligence (AI) and capable of 'learning' or adapting to the play of its opponents as a game develops.

The scientists have chosen a high profile time and venue - the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) - for the test now underway in Vancouver, Canada. In order to motivate the human players, a $50 000 prize is reserved for the overall winner.

The set-up consists of four 500-hand duplicate matches of Limit Texas Hold'em with blinds at $10/$20, with Eslami in one room and Laak in another. In each match the same series of cards will be dealt, with teammates playing the opposite hands in each game. So whatever cards Eslami gets in one hand will be the same the computer gets against Laak, and vice-versa. Community cards will be the same for both, and no communication will be allowed.

At the end of each session, the combined bankroll of the human team will be compared to the combined bankroll of the bot team to determine the winner.

If the human team wins by more than 25 small bets in a session, they'll take $5 000. If it's 25 or less (a statistical tie), the players will get $2 500 per session.

The four separate sessions will be played over two days, allowing both teams to learn more about their opponent and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Monday evening's session saw Polaris switch to a super-aggressive style of play, resulting in a win for the robot, but the human poker pros came back with a new strategy of fluctuating conservative and aggressive tactics for the afternoon match Tuesday which gave them a third session win.

Laak is complimentary about Polaris, saying it is a strong opponent and the end result could be a draw, although it is not yet capable of out-skilling humans. "Right now I think Polaris is a phenomenal player," Laak said, adding that in his opinion it is not yet superior to skilled human opponents.

Chess and checkers programmed computers have been able to beat talented human players in these games in the past, but poker represents a more formidable challenge for programmers due to the higher degrees of uncertainty and flexibility inherent in the game.

"These elements make poker an interesting research challenge and are also prevalent in real-world problems for which [Artificial Intelligence] techniques are being sought," a spokesman for the University of Alberta team that created Polaris said.

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