Poker pros face off with computer

Poker champion Phil Laak reckoned he had a good chance of winning when he sat down last night to play two days and 2,000 hands of Texas Hold’em - against a computer. It may be the last chance he gets.

Computers have gotten a lot better at poker in recent years; they’re good enough now to challenge top professionals like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004. But it’s only a matter of time before the machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy.

Just as they already have in backgammon and chess, computers are expected to surpass human poker players within a decade.

“This match is extremely important, because it’s the first time there’s going to be a man-machine event where there’s going to be a scientific component,” said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer.

The Canadian university’s games research group is considered the best of its kind in the world. After defeating an Alberta-designed program several years ago, Laak was so impressed that he estimated his edge at a mere 5 percent.

“This robot is going to do just fine,” he predicted ahead of the game.

The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw.

Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.

That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer’s.

A game of uncertainty

The two-day contest takes place not at a casino, but at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver. Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information.

“You don’t have perfect information about what state the game is in, and particularly what cards your opponent has in his hand,” said Dana S. Nau, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park. “When an opponent does something, you can’t be sure why.”

In checkers or chess, every contest starts the same way, then evolves through an enormous, but finite, number of possible states according to a consistent set of rules. With enough computing power, a computer can build a tree with a branch representing every possible future move, then choose the one that leads most directly to victory. That’s the strategy IBM’s Deep Blue computer used to defeat chess champion Gary Kasparov in their famous 1997 match.

Yet poker involves not just myriad possibilities but uncertainty, both about what cards the opponent is holding and more importantly, how he is going to play them.

“It’s mandatory for you to understand how the other guy approaches the game. This is critical information in poker,” said Darse Billings, a recent Alberta PhD who has worked on the robot for 15 years - except for a three-year break to play poker professionally.

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