[computer-go] OT U. of Alberta bots vs. the Poker pros

[Tom Cooper]

At 18:20 26/07/2007, Jeff Nowakowski  wrote:

>On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 18:14 +0200, chrilly wrote:
> > Chess/Go... can be played in an autistic way. There is no need for an
> > opponent model.
>
>Ah, an opponent model.  Where's the poision?
>
>http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/quotes#qt0250635
>
>Too much rock, paper, scissors in poker for my tastes.  Can there ever
>be a "best" player?  At least in Go the differences in strength are very
>clear, and some guy off the street who learned the game a year ago is
>not going to win a tournament.
>
>-Jeff



Rock,paper,scissors, also known as Roshambo is not an interesting game in my
opinion (except perhaps for the human psychology involved).  Because of the
symmetry between the strategies, it is clear that objectively speaking, all
strategies are equally good, even for multi-round games.  There is a 
single optimal
mixed strategy which chooses a move at random from a distribution for which
each play has probability 1/3.

However, if you break that symmetry, say by adding a 1/100 of a round 
bonus every
time a player chooses rock, the game becomes more interesting, though 
it is still
possible to find the optimal mixed strategy in a few lines of calculation.

Any variety of poker is sufficiently complicated that it is very difficult to
find an optimal mixed strategy, and therefore it is, as far as my 
interest in it
is concerned, very different from Roshambo.  Perhaps it is true 
though that even
with an optimal strategy, the 'noise' on ones winnings would be so high that
one wouldn't stand out from the crowd.