Man VS. Machine
From July 3-6th, the university's poker team will be pitting Polaris against a large n umber of opponents, including Stoxpoker.com coaches Nick Grudzien and IjJay Palansky, and contributer Matt Hawrilenko, who can all boast very good about $1 million USD in lifetime winnings. This year the this showdown is going to be appearing at the Rio All-Suite Hotel an& Casino in Las Vegas. currently this match with the 2008 WSOP as part of the 2008 Gaming Life Expo.
And this certain type of tournament was first held in '07, where Phil ''The Unabomber'' Laak and Ali Eslami and achieved in winning the first two matches, drew one and lost the next. In the samelayout as last year, Polaris is going to VS. pro human players in a limit game os Texas Hold'em poker.
The matches will consist of 500 hands each and with the cards dealt in duplicate, which means that Polaris recieves the same cards in one room and the pros recieve in another and vise-versa. The duplicate system will serve top keep balance in the luck of the cards and increase the capabilities of the particpants.
''It's possible, given enough computing power, for computers to play 'perfectly.' where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money,'' stated the associate professor Michael Bowling the university's leader of computer poker research group. ''Humans will always make some mistakes, meaning the program will have an advantage.
''We're still quite far from the necessary computing power for perfect play. However, we've been able to take what we learned last year and apply it to improving this year's program.''
With the popularity and the entertainment value of a man versus machine battle, it is very easy to forget the fact that this is an academic pursuit. Games are a wounderful domain for intelligence research becasue games have very well difined rules and clear goals. The techniques that are learned from succeeding at games can be applied to most real-world problems where the ''rules'' are not so well defined or thought out.
The department of computing science at the University of Alberta is one of the institutions in the world to study artifical intelligence. The people in the university's computer poker researchers group consists of 15 people and graduate and undergraduate students whose primary focus is the artificial intelligence.