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

[Tom Cooper]

At 12:42 28/07/2007, you wrote:
>At 02:58 28/07/2007, Arend wrote:
>
>
>
>>On 7/26/07, chrilly 
>><<mailto:c.donninger at wavenet.at>c.donninger at wavenet.at> wrote:
>>This is a remarkable result. I think poker is more difficult than Go and of
>>course chess.
>>
>>
>>I am as surprised by this statement as everyone else. Of course you 
>>have to develop some mixed strategies, try go guess implied pot 
>>odds, folding equity etc. but assuming you have access to a large 
>>database of high level poker games to analyze, why should it be 
>>that hard, esp. in 2-person limit Hold'em?
>>
>>Arend
>
>
>It seems plausible to me that poker should, in some sense, be more 
>complicated than go.  I'll ignore the massive savings from clever 
>search tricks in both games.  In order to get optimal play in go, it 
>is necessary to search over all legal positions, of which there are 
>fewer than 3^(19^2).  In order to get optimal play (ie a Nash 
>equilibrium) in poker, it is necessary to search over all strategies 
>(of both players).  A strategy is a map from your knowledge (the 
>cards you can see and the opponent's bids) to an action.  Even if we 
>assume a single round of bidding, the number of strategies for a 
>single player is roughly (no. of actions)^(no.hands * no opponents 
>bids).  This is massively higher than the number of go positions.
>_______________________________________________


Sorry, this isn't what I meant to say.  A sensible strategy in poker 
has to involve bluffing, so it is a map from knowledge into 
distributions over actions.  The point about it's being bigger than 
the space for go is right though.