Eleven years ago a man against machine contest was staged as chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov was beaten in a chess match against IBM’s Big Blue computer.
Now programmers from the University of Alberta have developed a computer system called Polaris designed to defeat the world top poker players.
It was put to the test in a contest at the current World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, whereby the computer took on some top professional players in six separate head to head matches plus an opening exhibition game.
It managed to win three of the games, lost two other games and drew the other game. It also won the exhibition match.
Each game consisted of 500 hands of poker, and experts believed it would be much more difficult for programmers to design software to beat human poker players than human chess players.
Research team leader Michael Bowling from the University of Alberta said, “In general, problems in the real world are going to be more like poker than chess.
“In chess or checkers, you have perfect information. There are no secrets on the board. But in poker you don’t know the other person’s cards. The basic computer techniques used in chess can’t help you in poker.”
Polaris was designed five years ago, early on it managed to beat amateur poker players but wasn’t good enough to beat the professionals. Last year it did better, only marginally losing to two professional poker players – Phil Laak and Antonio Esfandiari in an event in Canada.
The poker players that took on Polaris this time were Ijay Palansky, Matt Hawrilenko, Mark Newhouse, Victor Acosta, Rich McRoberts, Kyle Hendon, Nick Grudzien and Bryce Paradis.
The human players played in pairs against the computer. The first match was an exhibition match which saw Polaris defeated Bryce Paradis and Victoria Acosta.
Matt Hawrilenko and Ijay Palansky then got some revenge for the human players by winning the first proper match but the machine got the better of Nick Grudzien and Kyle Hendon in match number two. In the third match, the result was a draw in another contest between Polaris and Grudzien and Hendon. Rich McRoberts and Victoria Acosta then levelled the score at two games all, after four matches played. In the fifth match, Polaris got the better of Ijay Palansky and Mark Newhouse. In the final encounter, Polaris sealed the series with its biggest margin of victory in the event by winning against Ijay Palansky and Matt Hawrilenko.
Ijay Palansky commented afterwards that the computer made some strange moves that a human player would never do. Matt Hawrilenko echoed Palansky’s comments but said the system has proved it can beat some of the world’s top poker players in head to head matches.
Hawrilenko said, “For those of us who make our incomes largely from heads-up games, whether computers are ready to beat us or not, they’re certainly ready to beat some of our opponents.”
