by: PokerCoder News Round-Up
Over on the minimalist gambling news blog, Smash-Vegas, there is an excellent series of beginner articles on the “Anatomy of a Pokerbot” , using the open source pokerbot software, OpenHoldem. The series of posts on Smash-Vegas covers a wide range of PokerCoder challenges when developing a Pokerbot from scratch, such as the importance of stealth, improving the AI development with Pokertracker software, and using screen scrapers effectively.
The collection of posts of Smash-Vegas also covers introduction to Pokerbot strategy, and a brief, informative riff on First steps in Coding a Pokerbot. An interesting resource revealed in the pokerbot post is the OpenHoldem End-User documentation and formulas.
Taking a last look at the Man vs. Machine Pokerbot championship last month, the University of Alberta research team leading had an amusing quote that “real world problems are more like poker than chess” after the match on MSNBC.
“It’s hard to describe how good that felt,” research team leader Michael Bowling said in a report from the University of Alberta. “As a group, we may not all be great poker players, but all of us really, really want to win.”
Bowling pointed out that this was just a first step. “This was really the simplest form of poker,” he said. “There’s a lot more we can look at, such as playing without betting limits, or playing with more than two opponents. One of the reasons I got excited about this line of research is that it’s not just a one-off. It’s a really challenging path of research.”
Historically, computers have been better at games where all the information is essentially out there on the board - for instance, chess and checkers. Poker is trickier, because players have to make judgments based on different amounts of information about the state of play.
“In general, problems in the real world are going to be more like poker than chess,” Bowling said.”
