370Z/28 wrote:I got a "Page not found".
Hmm!?
A long read and I hate to post a wall of text but I guess not everyone can access The New York Times?
A fascinating article.
Machines will soon be driving our cars and playing with us as well.
The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/magaz ... wanted=all
MICHAEL KAPLAN
Published: September 5, 2013 58 Comments
Stroll among the games at the Cosmopolitan, the newest casino on the Las Vegas Strip, and you might be overwhelmed by the latest whooping and flashing gamb|ing machines. All the high-resolution monitors and video effects, devoted to themes ranging from deep-sea-fishing expeditions to Spider-Man to the unsubtlest visions of cash washing over lucky winners, are only the most obvious signs of technology’s move onto the casino floor. Behind the scenes, server-based gaming now enables managers to rapidly alter payouts, raise or reduce betting minimums, even change games themselves. (In just minutes, a bank of slot machines styled for dance clubbers can be rethemed to appeal to church ladies on a Sunday afternoon.) But a few deceptively prim-looking machines represent an even greater technological leap, the biggest advance in automated gamb|ing since Charles Fey introduced the one-armed bandit in 1895. They owe the way they play to artificial intelligence.
The machines, called Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up p0ker, play the limit version of the popular game so well that they can be counted on to beat p0ker-playing customers of most any skill level. Gamblers might win a given hand out of sheer luck, but over an extended period, as the impact of luck evens out, they must overcome carefully trained neural nets that self-learned to play aggressively and unpredictably with the expertise of a skilled professional. Later this month, a new souped-up version of the game, endorsed by Phil Hellmuth, who has won more World Series of p0ker tournaments than anyone, will have its debut at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. The machines will then be rolled out into casinos around the world.
They will be placed alongside the pure numbers-crunchers, indifferent to the gambler. But p0ker is a game of skill and intuition, of bluffs and traps. The familiar adage is that in p0ker, you play the player, not the cards. This machine does that, responding to opponents’ moves and pursuing optimal strategies. But to compete at the highest levels and beat the best human players, the approach must be impeccable. Gregg Giuffria, whose company, G2 Game Design, developed Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up p0ker, was testing a prototype of the program in his Las Vegas office when he thought he detected a flaw. When he played passively until a hand’s very last card was dealt and then suddenly made a bet, the program folded rather than match his bet and risk losing more money. “I called in all my employees and told them that there’s a problem,” he says. The software seemed to play in an easily exploitable pattern. “Then I played 200 more hands, and he never did anything like that again. That was the point when we nicknamed him Little Bastard.”
Illustration by Tim Enthoven
The pokerbot, which takes on one challenger at a time, can trace its roots to the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment in Kjeller, Norway. Until 2002, that’s where an engineer named Fredrik Dahl worked on artificial intelligence for secret government projects on combat simulations. The job involved using neural networks. Functioning much like an extremely focused, one-dimensional version of the human brain, these complex computer algorithms develop strategies that emerge through so many repetitive mathematical calculations that few humans could reproduce, much less endure them. Dahl’s work on two-sided, zero-sum games, where there is no mutual interest, proved to be useful in developing strategies to win not only wars but also p0ker games.
He started with backgammon, though. While a student at the University of Oslo, where he concentrated on computer science, he developed a penchant for the game. He once made it to the finals of the Norwegian National Backgammon Championships. “One thing I learned from backgammon is how to handle losses, no matter how well I play,” he says. “It is not a good game for sore losers.”
Rather than be sore, he used computers to improve his play. Dahl created a neural net that predicted the probability of winning a backgammon match from each position on the board, at every possible stage in a game. Any individual situation is easy enough to solve, Dahl says; the challenge was determining all possible situations, giving value to the importance of each one and choosing a play. “The program needed to self-train and discover these strategies itself,” Dahl says.
Dahl spent a year working part time on his program and started selling it by mail order in 1997 for $250 a floppy disk. He figures that he sold thousands of copies, and that its impact was even broader thanks to the pirating of his software. Among those whose play it improved was a Texas-based actuary named Malcolm Davis, whom Dahl describes as a top backgammon player in the world at the time. Davis and Dahl ended up talking over backgammon strategies.
In 2000, Dahl began work on a similar program for p0ker. He was inspired by the challenge of creating a program that could come up with solutions for a game characterized by incomplete information. Unlike backgammon, in which an opponent’s position is visible, a p0ker player does not know what another player’s cards are and so cannot follow pure strategies. Instead, he needs to consider a range of hands that his opponent might have and estimate the best response to the various possibilities. The uncertainty, combined with an opponent’s ability to bluff, makes it difficult to write software that plays p0ker effectively.
Dahl gave his neural nets rudimentary game-playing instructions and programmed them to probe for weaknesses as they played one another. “They computed probability, based on the other player’s actions,” Dahl says. “I had the neural nets play training games and experiment with various approaches.” Eventually, through trial and error, he says, “they learned to be successful.”
Dahl recalls staring at his computer screen, watching his neural nets compete, when he saw one of them make a fairly sophisticated bluff known as floating. You do this by playing passively, initiating no bets and matching the ones that your opponent makes. If, after the turn card is played, your opponent does not bet, you do. His slowing down usually means that he had been overplaying his cards with the hope that you would fold or his hand would improve. Your bet here signals that you’ve just made a strong hand or that you have been inducing him to put as much money as possible in the pot because you have had a superior hand from the start. “At first, I wasn’t even familiar with that strategy,” Dahl says. “Later, I thought it was amazing that the neural net could come up with a known, successful strategy on its own.”
Even as Dahl recognized the improvement and appreciated that his software played better on its five-billionth hand than on its two-billionth, he dismissed any commercial application for it as too difficult. “I started doing the p0ker project for fun,” he says. “Then, in 2003, Malcolm talked me into doing it for real.”
Doing it for real meant creating a machine that could be put in casinos. As originally designed by Dahl, the brain of his game adjusted to the opposition. If, for example, an opponent folded a lot, it played aggressively; if it faced aggressive play, it tried to trap. Casino commissions, however, mandate that a gaming machine cannot change its playing style in response to particular opponents. A p0ker game must play a World Series of p0ker champion the same way it does a neophyte, so Dahl’s machine would not be able to learn from its experience in a casino.
“The neural net’s learning needs to be frozen” is how Dahl puts it. Yet it would also have to play well enough so that few humans could consistently beat it. For Dahl, now 46 and a natural pessimist, this was a predicament he did not think he could overcome. “I thought that if it is vulnerable to even one person’s strategy, that is a huge problem — then other people learn how to do it, and the machine collapses,” Dahl says.
Illustration by Tim Enthoven
Dahl eventually retooled his neural net so that it would teach itself to play a perfectly defensive game. Rather than steer it to study its opponent and try to capitalize on weaknesses, the net was directed to make itself as hard to beat as possible. “Ordinarily, you figure out weaknesses in your opponent and find ways to exploit those weaknesses,” Dahl says. “But because our program needs to be stable, it can’t do that. So instead it does everything it can to prevent itself from being exploited. The theory behind it is almost paranoid.”
Dahl’s game grew more unpredictable over time, as the neural nets learned. Eventually, it got to the point where, over thousands of hands, they would each orchestrate the optimal number of bluffs; but in any one hand, the program might do anything. What’s more, a second neural net, which plays in a slightly different style, was introduced to reinforce the machine’s unpredictability; when an opponent has a reduced stack of chips, a third net takes over and plays in a manner customized for that situation. Like three tag-team fighters, the nets alternate against an opponent. At random moments, the machine’s mode of play might change the level of its aggressiveness.
By 2006, after thousands of neural nets, tweaked repeatedly, had played billions of hands, Dahl recruited gifted p0ker-playing friends to take on his game. It won frequently enough to hold up in a casino environment, he thought. Malcolm Davis then brought it to the attention of Bob Hamman, a frequent backgammon opponent of his and the bridge partner of Bill Gates.
Though Hamman ranks among the world’s top bridge players, he plays cards only as a hobby. He makes his living by insuring promotional contests (like those at company outings where attendees might win $10,000 for sinking a 30-foot putt, for example). Intrigued by the software’s potential, Hamman tested it against both other p0ker-playing programs and a young bridge master named Justin Lall. “Justin also happens to be a skilled p0ker player,” Hamman says. “He’s skilled enough that if you think you want to make a living playing against Justin, you might want to reconsider. He said it’s a good game. He found it captivating. He came close to beating it.”
Soon after, in October 2006, Hamman called Gregg Giuffria, a neighbor of Gates’s at the Del Mar Country Club in Southern California, where both had homes. Giuffria was once better known as a member of the hard-rock band Angel, but now he ran a company that made gamb|ing machines. After a bit of small talk, Hamman told him about Dahl’s software. “It’s real smart,” he said. “I thought it was only interesting. But then you play against it and realize that it’s bluffing you. All of a sudden, you’re talking to steel and glass like it’s human.”
By the time Giuffria heard from Hamman, he had already wandered far from arena stages. He took the first step in 1990, 15 years after Angel’s first album came out, when he had a life-changing dinner with Lee Iacocca, the former Chrysler chairman. (Giuffria’s wife, April, knew Iacocca as a family friend.) “I thought I was not the dumbest guy at the table,” Giuffria says, “but the dumbest guy on the planet.” He suddenly saw himself as a 39-year-old “white boy chasing rock ‘n’ roll, with hip-hop coming in — it was time for me to reinvent myself.”
Days later, he cut his hair and, on the advice of Iaccoca, began analyzing patents that the Defense Department was allowing to be released to the public sector. The hope was that Giuffria would discover an unexploited business opportunity and maybe Iaccoca would partner with him to develop it. Giuffria came across a company called Summit Systems that held a patent for a mathematical process that had an application for slot machines. Iaccoca passed, so Giuffria used royalties from his music career to acquire rights to the patent from the moribund company and eventually helped sell them to International Game Technology, now the world’s largest manufacturer of slot machines. “In one afternoon,” Giuffria says, “I made more money from that patent than I had in 18 years of touring, writing songs and getting gold records with Angel.”
That success hooked Giuffria on the gamb|ing industry. He and Iacocca collaborated on casino developments around the country. Later, Giuffria built a Hard Rock casino near New Orleans and got into creating gamb|ing machines. “It’s all entertainment,” Giuffria says, when describing the transition from rocker to gaming entrepreneur.
Illustration by Tim Enthoven
Giuffria liked the sound of what Hamman had to offer. What’s more, Giuffria had not forgotten the valuable lesson he learned in 1998 when he passed up a chance to invest in Triple Play Draw p0ker, a video-p0ker machine that turned out to be one of the most successful games of its type. Had Giuffria made that earlier investment, he’d be a billionaire today.
Not long after Hamman first called, he and Malcolm Davis flew from Dallas to meet Giuffria in Las Vegas. “They showed me a gray screen on a computer,” he says. “It dealt cards, you played for units, it tallied who won and lost. It was in a very stark form, but, like Bob said, as soon as it started bluffing against me, I realized that this was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. I wouldn’t let it walk out the door.”
Giuffria decided to develop the card-playing software into an actual casino machine, knowing that it would cost more than $5 million to devise a prototype with a case, monitor, graphics and sound effects.
For starters, he and his tech guys needed to test each neural net. But because these had been developed through self-training and not created by humans, there was no source code — the computer instructions written out by programmers — to analyze. You couldn’t track the logic behind the system’s actions. “We had to take a black-box approach,” says Bob Honeycutt, Giuffria’s lead engineer on the project. They had to look at the results without being able to know how they were produced. Honeycutt customized math-based programs that look for probabilities to play p0ker against Fredrik Dahl’s neural nets. Honeycutt’s software lost. The neural nets showed no patterns or anomalies.
Next, local p0ker pros dropped by to test it out. Mike (the Mouth) Matusow, famous for his loquaciousness, “came over and treated the machine like it was one of his buddies,” Giuffria says. “He’d say, ‘What, are you drawing down on me with a pair of 4s?’ Some pros came in here, sure that they can beat the machine, and then left angry when they couldn’t. It really upset people.”
The visceral reactions pleased Giuffria, who saw value in the personification of the machine. “A lot of people who play this are interested in live p0ker, but they are too intimidated to jump in there,” says Anthony Lucas, professor of casino management at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. “[This] gives them a chance to play without running the risk of being judged or embarrassed for making a bad move. This is private. Nobody criticizes your strategy.” In addition, he says, it’s perfect for a generation that likes to lose itself in Angry Birds: “If you prefer not to interact or socialize with people, you can play this game the same way you would watch TV or go online.”
Convinced that he had a market — and confident that players wouldn’t worry about the legitimacy of the “cards” dealt by the machine any more than they do about the house’s dice being loaded — Giuffria moved ahead. His team created digitized cards, chips and green felt and added realistic sound effects.
Before Giuffria showed his machine to I.G.T., which had the right of first refusal to whatever games he created, he sent it to the New Jersey-based Gaming Laboratories International, a kind of Underwriters Laboratories for casino gamb|ing. “We asked them to punch holes in it,” Giuffria says. It usually takes about a month to test a game, but G.L.I. kept Dahl’s neural nets for about nine months.
Giuffria asked how humans would do against it. “Oh,” he recalls the lab telling him, “they’ll get killed.”
Because a never-beatable game will not succeed in a casino, the machine was programmed to occasionally play in a weak, passive style, seeming to reduce the game’s edge and re-engaging casual players. The result is that this game “gets accused of having leaks,” Giuffria says; posters gloat online about its weaknesses. Inevitably, he adds, the take-away is: " ‘Of course I will beat it.’ They don’t know that it might be one of the hands that falls into a gray area where the machine takes a dive deliberately.”
Giuffria seems to take the knocks personally. Nevertheless, he does not correct the mistaken impressions. “No way did I want to put out there that not only do we have a machine they can’t beat, but we’ve spent two years trying to dummy it down so that it doesn’t beat humans all the time. That would have made enemies. We kept our mouths shut.”
Natasha Dow Schull, an associate professor at M.I.T. and the author of “Addiction by Design: Machine gamb|ing in Las Vegas,” describes the experience of playing Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up p0ker as feeling as if you’re taking on “a really good medieval automaton” with “a little man behind the curtain.” Giuffria seems to prefer not to break this humanizing spell, so that players who experience the occasional wins will believe that the machine is beatable. “Gamblers continually overestimate their abilities,” says Mike Dixon, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario with a specialization in gamb|ing. “It’s like hitting a half-court shot occasionally and thinking it makes you into Carmelo Anthony.”
The game has developed a small but fervent fan base since its slow-drip release began two years ago, with about 200 machines so far located in Las Vegas, Mississippi and California (all states where live versions of p0ker thrive). When it appeared on the casino floors of Bellagio and Aria, Las Vegas casinos where some of America’s highest-stakes p0ker games take place, Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up p0ker captured the imaginations of big-money players.
A very few p0ker professionals, particularly those who specialize in one-on-one limit Texas Hold ‘Em, actually have a shot at winning regularly. Michael Reed, a pro gambler from Pittsburgh, credibly claims to fall into that category. So far, over the course of 500 hours, he says, he averages about $135 per hour in profits, playing at the $20- or $40-bet level. This means that by making the maximum bets throughout a hand, he can win or lose $500 in seconds.
He has not seen many others turning a profit. “Over all, this machine crushes people,” he says. “The machine is far too aggressive and steals far too many pots.”
How does Reed manage to overcome a machine that has been so hard to beat? He says it “gains its edge by being the aggressor. It almost never check-calls, or simply matches an opponent’s bet without a raise. The bot gives credit to your hand when you raise and reraise.” Unseasoned players, Reed says, have a habit of folding hands that might seem inferior. Reed has discovered that playing connecting cards like 7 and 8 can have unexpected value. “If a high card comes on the flop, the machine often folds to a bet from you, believing that you have made a high pair. So you have the middle range [of flopped cards] from which you can make hands, and the high range from which you can bluff. If you don’t bet, the bot will want to.” It’s been estimated that Reed is among 100 or so people in the world who can steadily beat the machine.
I relayed this to Bill McBeath, Aria’s former president and a high-stakes p0ker player in his own right, and he laughed. McBeath said that when somebody tells him that he can beat the machine, his reply is: " ‘Come back and see me in a year, pal.’ The game does not have a statistical advantage over players, but the imperfections of human capabilities mean that it inevitably wins.” I started to explain Reed’s experiences, and McBeath cut me off. “Look, there was a 24-year-old who had beaten it for a while. Now he’s broke. And I think this machine had something to do with his demise.”
Only 200 Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up p0ker machines are now in circulation. Triple Play Draw p0ker can have 100 machines in a single casino. As part of the effort to get closer to this level, the new Hellmuth machine and another new one created with Johnny Chan (who ranks No. 2 in World Series wins) have more than just the endorsements of the p0ker pros. Their styles and personalities have also been added to the machines. The Pro Series will incorporate neural nets that seem to play according to Hellmuth’s tight but forceful approach or the aggressive strategy that inspired Chan’s nickname, The Orient Express.
Brian Perego, a movie-industry veteran, recorded Chan and Hellmuth repeating their favorite lines — “I dodge bullets, baby!” is one of Hellmuth’s — and expressing various reactions that will be played on the machines’ video monitors. “When a hand starts to get serious, Phil might put on his sunglasses,” Perego says. “It will be fun, but there will be psych-out moves, just like at a real p0ker table.”
The technology behind Dahl’s game has the potential to do a lot more than simply taking money from casino customers. Dahl could see it being adapted to make credibility assessments, like deciding who should get a loan, for example, by analyzing applicants in comparison with databases of borrowers who repaid their loans and those who did not.
Hector Levesque, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto who specializes in A.I., also sees the bigger picture for this sort of technology. “Pushing hard on statistics and learning [via neural nets] can have a big impact,” he says, while cautioning that that should not be mistaken for having the ability to think in the multidimensional, contextual sense. “The biggest technology coming out of A.I. is getting examples of reasonable behavior and learning from statistics. Google search does so well because it has to do with statistics and adjusts from that. Same with the driverless car. Airline pricing is basically a game, played against people who want to buy tickets. The airline comes up with a price that is not high enough to discourage customers but still maximizes profits. p0ker and games are not so far from things that have real economic bite if you can train the neural nets properly.”
For now, however, Dahl’s interest is in whether Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up p0ker can withstand the onslaught that will come with wider exposure. Back in Vegas one Sunday afternoon, I caught up with Johnny Chan on the gaming floor of MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, where he was about to play in a baccarat tournament. “I get e-mails all the time, with people challenging me and wanting to play me heads-up,” Chan said. “They’ll get a chance to do it with this machine.”
I asked him if he thought anyone could win big over the long haul, beyond what Mike Reed has managed to grind out. “Nothing is impossible,” Chan said. Then he added that some people see Texas Hold ‘Em Heads Up p0ker as a potential gold mine. “You probably have five groups out there right now, testing the machine, writing down all the results, getting every play blow by blow and figuring out what to do on every hand. One hundred percent, I’m sure there are teams working on it.”
The pokerbot just put its sunglasses on.
Michael Kaplan is the gamb|ing columnist for Cigar Aficionado and has written for Wired, Men’s Journal and other publications.
Editor: Dean Robinson
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 8, 2013
An article on Page 44 this weekend about a p0ker playing machine renders incorrectly part of the name of a company that is the largest manufacturer of slot machines. It is International Game Technology, not International Gaming Technology.
A version of this article appears in print on September 8, 2013, on page MM44 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Sharkbot.
Comments Closed
drDave
Chicago
Not being a gambler, it just amazes me that anyone would want to play these machines. If almost no-one is good enough to beat them, aren't you just throwing your money away?
Sept. 10, 2013 at 11:01 a.m.
Recommend1
David Sklansky
Las Vegas
Michael Kaplan does a terrific job of explaining how the first "game theory optimum" (gto) p0ker machine has made its way into casinos. All the top pros have now made it their business to come as close as possible to this unexploitable style but of course they still lag behind a machine that has honed its strategy, not through calculation, (which is also doable in theory) but rather fine tuning through billions of hands.
Sept. 9, 2013 at 2:28 p.m.
Recommend1
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Austria-este
If the casinos install all these can't lose games, aren't people going to not want to play it?
I mean, if there's no chance of winning, why would you play?
Sept. 9, 2013 at 2:28 p.m.
Recommend
Dave
NJ
What happens when someone adapts this machine to play online p0ker? Eventually, even the heads-up-only limitation may be overcome. Online p0ker is available in some places and will probably be legal again in the US eventually. It's tough enough playing against the older p0ker bots and really good players online. Imagine what happens when the new, improved machines are used.
Sept. 8, 2013 at 5:42 p.m.
Recommend
John Anthony
Florida
The fact that casinos need to make these electronic devices "fair" enough to retain a customer base for them is interesting, especially in light of some of the comments about government sponsored/sanctioned gamb|ing. I think that the average "non-gambler" seems to forget that they gamble every year/month when they pay for auto/home/life/health insurance - one is in essence betting the insurance company that one's auto/home/life/heath will sustain some type of damage, and the "house", aka the insurance companies, take those bets at odds very favorable to them. These "casinos" make considerable campaign contributions.
Perhaps the very essence of the healthcare debate is whether the governmental purpose of "promote[ing] the general welfare" extends to helping people stay healthy. If the answer to that is yes, then allowing those companies that currently constitute "the house" to profit by stacking the odds against "we the people" seems to be at odds with that purpose. Perhaps neural networks and AI systems could calculate that odds that would allow a "casino" to merely break even when taking health care bets ...
Sept. 8, 2013 at 5:42 p.m.
Recommend1
ad
nyc
Seems like if you keep switching the machine you are playing on, the machines won't get to know you.
Sept. 8, 2013 at 5:42 p.m.
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Matt Ng
New York, NY
The article points out that the casino version is not designed to learn an opponents style but to make the optimal play at each stage.
Moving from one machine to another does not provide the player with an advantage.
Sept. 9, 2013 at 2:28 p.m.
Recommend
vaporland
Denver, Colorado, USA
When I was sixteen, in 1975, I wrote a p0ker playing program for the Hewlett-Packard 2000 Time Shared BASIC minicomputer, a system used in hundreds of school districts throughout the USA at the time.
As noted in this article, the algorithms to play p0ker convincingly are difficult to code, but were especially difficult on a minicomputer with 8K RAM shared between 32 users.
This computer used the little doughnut-core magnet type of random access memory that cost something like $2 per byte; solid state memory was not on the market yet.
In 'version 1.0' of p0ker, the play was boring and stiff. So, to jazz things up, I programmed the system to cheat 51% of the time, i.e., in 51% of the hands, the program would look at its opponents cards.
If it held a better hand, it would keep playing. If it held the losing hand, it would fold.
Version 1.1 immediately became fun to play. It was eerie how that program suddenly seemed to have a mind of its own. The combination of random luck and cheating gave the software a HAL-like simulated intelligence.
Needless to say, I took a lot of lunch money from fellow students at the time. I also got an 'A' for the project.
The ultimate lesson I learned: never trust software.
Today, I never play electronic games of chance for money. When I have the opportunity, I do love playing blackjack with real cards.
'Internet' p0ker? You're kidding, right? I'd rather go up against the NSA...
Sept. 8, 2013 at 8:51 a.m.
Recommend4
MikeM
Fort Collins,CO
If the NSA trusted sottware OR hardware, there wouldn't be restrictions on buying security hardware from China or having non-patriotic citizens writing software.
I too do not trust software. OTOH, casinos do not gamble. Their customers do but the casinos aren't gamb|ing. It's the difference between one hand of cards and 10 thousands hands.
If the machine is profitable to them, stay away from it.
Sept. 8, 2013 at 5:42 p.m.
Recommend
Bill Kennedy
California
Gerald Tesauro of IBM should get credit for the first good neural net to play a difficult game of strategy [backgammon.]
Sept. 8, 2013 at 8:51 a.m.
Recommend2
Nostranditmas
Brooklyn
And after you've been cleaned out, you can take your watch to the robot pawn broker.
Sept. 8, 2013 at 8:51 a.m.
Recommend
Matt
California
This is cool, but notice that it's a heads up, limit hold 'em game. By FAR the easiest to model and build a learning algorithm for. No one has built any algorithm yet that's anything but worthless in less regimented games, say full table no limit hold 'em.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 5:01 p.m.
Recommend2
Tom
Las Vegas
Like most articles by Mr.Kaplan there is a lot flight of fancy.
Yes, most players will lose playing these machines like all gamb|ing games, but I have a question for Mr. Kaplan. If these machines are such great winners, why did Caesars and the Rio removed these machines earlier this year? Why did the Cosmopolitan just remove the machines? Why did EVERY casino drop comps for playing these?
I don't think it was all the money they were making on them.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:50 p.m.
Recommend2
Democritus Jr
Pacific Coast
A neural net has infinite patience and its capacity to learn is only limited by the number of memory chips stuffed in its chassis, in enough time its play gets better. Like a cockroach, it will win the long game. But why play against a cockroach?
BTW: One way to prevent blatant backdoor cheating would be to separate the dealing system from the playing neural net and make it a pluggable module that records its deals. The dealer module could be certified by a third party. If a player suspects that the machine has slipped in a card, they can request an audit of the game. A suspicious player might insist on their own dealer.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.
Recommend2
areber
Point Roberts, WA
Interesting. I'm surprised they didn't around to interviewing the folks at University of Alberta who've been working on p0ker bots for years. There's a chapter in my book on them.
http://www.amazon.com/p0ker-Other-Confu ... 09QQ5QK8/r...
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.
Recommend1
David Paredes
Brookline, MA
Michael Kaplan again shows why he is the best writer about p0ker working today. Fantastic article and for anyone interested in p0ker/gamb|ing I highly recommend you read his other work, the high quality and research this article demonstrates is not an aberration.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.
Recommend
Barefoot Boy
Brooklyn, NY
This is one of the more disturbing articles on AI that I've read.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.
Recommend3
billcarson
Santa Fe, NM
I read the entire article with interest even though I never casino gamble. Why do people want to casino gamble with such horrible odds? You'd think they'd gravitate toward financial options and the futures market. Yeah, those might have a lot of risk, but you do have at lease a chance of winning.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.
Recommend1
Steve C.
Bend, Oregon
Texas Hold 'Em is a ridiculous game anyway. Seven card stud is more fun and when you play blackjack you don't have to worry about tells and bluffs and the rest of that, which I'll never be able to do no matter how hard I try.
Sept. 5, 2013 at 3:16 p.m.
Recommend4
Simon M
Dallas
Never, ever gamble with machines in casinos, they are rigged to beat you! If you're going to play p0ker, play against the drunk humans you can find in any live game after midnite at most casinos anywhere in the world!
Sept. 5, 2013 at 3:16 p.m.
Recommend9
George
New York
Colonel: Thanks for that tip. I'll save that along with my own protocol: "I never play a slot machine that I can't understand." (This is most of them these days.)
Howard G: I resemble that remark... once in a great while I will venture into a casino and IF there is a $5 blackjack table, I'll sit down and play until I've reached my modest limit of "spending money." I don't consider that I have been given anything except entertainment. I suspect I'm in the minority on that. Once in a while I do come out "ahead"-- if you don't count the gas money to get to the casino.
I'm with those who won't get near the cyber-p0ker machine. I can't imagine that I have even an unreasonable expectation of winning a single hand. Deal me out...
Sept. 5, 2013 at 2:52 p.m.
Recommend5
The Colonel
Boulder, CO
NOTE: The Colonel is a professional op-ed writer who writes on gamb|ing from time to time.
Anything "Crazy Phil" Hellmuth is involved with is probably sticky or loss oriented. Best to play p0ker with your friends not strangers. The Las Vegas and Atlantic City locals are p0ker sharks. They are patient as snakes.
They will wait all day at a table until a tourist sits down, and they get a hand. Then they suck in the tourist, take in a nice pot, and they are done for the day. In short, The Colonel advises all readers NOT TO SIT DOWN AT A p0ker GAME WITH LOCALS.
The Colonel
Sept. 5, 2013 at 2:40 p.m.
Recommend8
Howard G
New York
NYT Pick
A few thoughts about this...the high-minded - "I'm much too smart to be suckered into this obvious scam that other people fall for" - comments not withstanding...
In all of its marketing and PR campaigns, the casino industry takes great care to present the "Gaming Experience" as entertainment; and makes an effort to point out that if you are coming to the casino with intentions of leaving with big money - then perhaps that's not the right place for you.
If you think about other forms of "entertainment" - such as going to a movie or the opera - you approach it with some reasonable expectation that you will be rewarded, in some fashion, in return for the price of your ticket.
Some people would have no qualms spending upwards of $500 for a ticket to an NBA game, or a Grand Tier seat at the MET opera -- while others may find it just as exhilarating and rewarding to spend an dropping their $500 into a slot machine.
Chacun à son goût
Actually - many people go to places like Las Vegas specifically for the other entertainment opportunities - such as the shows, world-class dining, and yes -- to see the "glitz" -- and who have little, if any interest in gamb|ing.
And yes --
There are people who DO have unreasonable expectations regarding winning big money.
There are those who will read this article, and perceive it as a personal challenge to prove they are smarter than any machine.
And there are people for whom compulsive gamb|ing is a very serious problem.
Sept. 5, 2013 at 1:30 p.m.
Recommend13
Yoandel
Boston, MA
So let's imagine that neural nets, that are not programmed, and that cannot be source-checked, take on complex matters like determining loans. If your loan was denied, then... there would be no explanation outside of "the machine for reasons unknown low-scored you..."
To be at the whim of decisions that logic cannot elucidate, and that cannot be explained step-by-step, or even written down...
That is a true definition of slavery.
Sept. 5, 2013 at 1:30 p.m.
Recommend7
Bill
Long Beach, CA
But every decision made by a human falls into the category where logic cannot elucidate and where step-by-step explanations never occur. Logic is not the primary mechanism humans use to make decisions, emotion is. Under the best of circumstances, logic is a guide to emotion, but usually its job is to rationalize decisions already made.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.
Recommend2
In the north woods
wi
Much like a large segment of the population addicted to hand-held devices. Slavery
Sept. 8, 2013 at 5:42 p.m.
Recommend
ES
Boston
Actually it's perfectly possible to determine 'why' a neural net makes a given decision by examining the gradients at the time of the decision-making.
This isn't magic. The neural net operates by applying a mathematical formula to one input to receive a certain output.
Of course, the reason for such associations quickly becomes tautological -- why did the neural net develop such-and-such a gradient between two nodes? Because it was fed on data that indicated a correlation between two data points.
The output is not determined by space wizards, it's determined by algorithms according to variables that can, theoretically, be looked up.
Now, the odds of your loan officer being granted the authority to investigate on such a deep programmatic level are essentially nil, but that is a problem of bureaucracies and human agents, not a new evil specifically inherent to neural nets.
Sept. 10, 2013 at 11:01 a.m.
Recommend
Dennis
Charolttesville, VA
This is brought to you by the folks who consider counting cards at blackjack (using a strategy with your brain, no machine) "cheating" and then banning players for being good.
I like playing p0ker because it's with other PEOPLE....remember them?
I also find chess simulators dull, dull, dull....
The casino's customers should vote with their feet and the cheat-o-matic's (actual playing aids) will go away...
Sept. 5, 2013 at 1:29 p.m.
Recommend5
geochandler
Los Alamos NM
Best strategy for playing a machine in Texas Hold 'em is the walkaway.
Sept. 5, 2013 at 1:29 p.m.
Recommend6
Richard
Massachusetts
gamb|ing is a highly regressive, non governmental tax on the mathematically challenged.
While I do not necessarily believe it should be outlawed (because outlawing only drives gamb|ing to organized crime). I do believe it needs to be heavily regulated including the odds. Furthermore the actual odds of the average gambler coming out ahead of the house should be mandated to be taught in every primary and secondary school public or private.
The fact that governments participate in gamb|ing is in my opinion a shameful exploitation of human weakness and a betrayal of the public trust.
I was once (about 40 years ago) was sent to Los Vagus for a conference and never gambled a penny. When I was give "free" tokens to get me started gamb|ing by the hotel/casino/conference center I simply cashed them in a pocketed the proceeds. The hotel management were not pleased. So I can say I came out a very few dollars ahead of the house by not playing their games.
Sept. 5, 2013 at 12:24 p.m.
Recommend26
Read All 4 Replies
LifeLoveHealth
San Francisco
Jon
"gamb|ing is for losers?" No, gamb|ing is a business and the "house," literally and figuratively, was built by people who lose their money.
The idea promoted by the "house" that gamb|ing/gaming is merely entertainment and should be viewed that way is similar to the alcohol beverage industry telling us disingenuously to "Drink Responsibly."
Drink (or gamble) Responsibility, OK, yeah, uh-huh , but JUST DO IT!
Sept. 5, 2013 at 2:40 p.m.
Recommend3
Howard G
New York
Regarding the high-minded concept that "gamb|ing is for losers"...
Does anybody here own stocks, bonds, or maintain any other type of "portfolio" ?
Well...just remember...
The only difference is - On Wall Street they refer to it as "investing" -- while on The Strip, they call it "gamb|ing".
And - in fact - I have many friends who have been hurt very badly as a result of their "investment activities" - while I know nobody personally who has ever suffered an equivalent loss at a casino.
Sept. 7, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.
Recommend1
Tom Magnum
Texas
This is simply a person who is risk averse and thinks that it is the way to go. I have gone to conventions in Vegas and found that Vegas is a great place to go if you want to be entertained, but not a great place to get a lot done on a non related business venue. No risk equals no reward. To each his own.
Sept. 8, 2013 at 5:42 p.m.
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Glad I got the 250 now. I should get about 30 mpg on the highway. It is 120 miles round trip from my house to Tunica.
