14 DAY TRIAL // In recent years, computers got better and better at playing poker and now a group of developers wants to prove that they've become good enough to challenge human champions and even steal their titles. The man vs. machine war for poker supremacy has just begun.
Poker champion Phil Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004, will be facing a computer in a challenge that wants to prove computers can now surpass even the best human poker players.
The most optimistic poker analysts say computers can now beat virtually any amateur player and will be able to defeat the best of the best in just under a decade. University of Alberta computing scientists offered $50,000 in prize money to Laak, in an interesting event.
"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.
Probably the most interesting part of the challenge will be the fact that Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami, who will be in another room and each of them will be getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against the other human player, in an effort to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible.
"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. "That means when an opponent does something, you can't be sure why."
Laak says that computers are getting better and better at the game, even though he defeated a previous version of the same computer several years ago. He estimates his overall advantage at only 5 percent and says he would have lost hadn't researchers let him examine the programming code and practice against the machine ahead of time.
"This robot is going to do just fine," Laak predicted. "Fine" for the humans or for the computers?