Computer Beats StoxPoker Team
In America, a computer created by a group of programmers from the University of Alberta made history on Sunday night by defeating seven players from online poker training site StoxPoker.com.
To prepare this year’s event, Bowling's team made modifications to the computer's ability to reason and also altered its capacity to learn and adapt to its human opponents. IJay Palansky played in two of the matches and stated that he enjoyed taking on the computer and that it made some bizarre moves that a human would never make. Matt Hawrilenko, who played in the final match, agreed but stated that Polaris II's win was scary for the future of head-to-head poker.
'For those of us who make our incomes largely from playing heads-up games, whether computers are ready to beat us or not, they're certainly ready to beat some of our opponents,' said Hawrilenko.
'They might win some of our money away.'
Bowling stated that there are improvements to be made, particularly tinkering with the computer's ability to learn and adapt. However, he called Polaris II's victory a ‘crossing point’ in the poker world where computer programmes can be considered equal to the best human players.
'It's going to take a bit of time for the poker world to digest,' said Bowling.
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Posted by tattyteddy – 14 Jul 2008, 2:46 AM
I'm not sure I'm excited about this at all as a player. As a geek its really interesting, but if they make better poker computers then they can make it harder to play online games against the site. Gambling already assumes the house always wins, making it even mroe in their favor doesn't sound like fun to me.