The professional poker player Phil Laak, also known as “The Unabomber”, will be playing against a poker-playing robot today and tomorrow. Also joining him will be fellow pro Ali Eslami as they attempt to outsmart the robot named ‘Polaris’. The brains behind the robot are the research team at the University of Alberta, and they are fairly confident that their computing skills will help Polaris come out on top against these seasoned pros.
The event will be taking place in the Hyatt Recency Hotel in Vancouver in Canada. The match-up will prove to be an exhibition of the Polaris robot as part of the yearly meeting for the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). It is expected that there will be a big crowd to watch the event take place and to cheer on the pros (the human ones of course).
The structure of the game being played is a little different than playing two standard heads-up tournaments. Both players will be playing 500 hands in limit Holdem against the computers simultaneously, but on separate tables. Both tables will be dealt identical cards along with identical boards should they require them, except the difference being that the cards dealt to Polaris in the separate games will be swapped around with the human’s cards. Therefore the cards being dealt to Laak in one game will be the same as the cards dealt to Polaris in the other, whilst the Polaris playing against Laak will have the same cards dealt to Eslami.
After the games have finished the results will be calculated and compared to find the winner of the tournament. The rules are that if Laak and Eslami manage to beat Polaris by 25 bets or more collectively, they will win and receive $5,000 for their troubles. However, if they do not win by 25 bets or more the game will be declared as a draw, but they will still receive $2,500 for their efforts.
The ability to create a robot that can play poker well highlights a big leap in the advances of Artificial Intelligence. It is far easier to be able to program a computer to play other games such as tic-tac-toe and checkers well, as all the information of the game is provided to you and there are far less variables. In poker there is always a lot of information missing, which makes it difficult to program a computer to make accurate decisions when there are so many variables to consider. It is expected that Laak and Eslami will win, but it would be a great day for technology and a sad day for poker if they didn’t. So wish them luck!
