Claremonters dealt a good hand Over the years, the game of poker has attracted more and more attention worldwide with the popularity of televised Texas Hold ‘em tournaments like the high stakes World Series of Poker. In the process, professional poker players have become celebrities, with catchy nicknames like Action Dan Harrington, Phil “the poker brat” Hellmuth and Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson. Getting swept up in the poker craze, a local software developer and his friend created a poker program that took top honors in this year’s Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Computer Poker Competition in Alberta, Canada. After going undefeated in the no-limit, heads-up category, Jay Cordes, 36, co-developer of BluffBot 2.0, took the news in stride. “We were just a couple of guys messing around and having fun with the program,” Mr. Cordes said of him and his partner, Teppo Salonen. But the two-man team proved to be a winning combination with their “poker robot” beating out teams of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Alberta and other academic institutions. The pair attributed their program’s success due to a conservative style of play, some well-timed bluffing and their competitors’ lack of programming creativity. “Most of the other competitors, being universities from around the world, were possibly focusing on producing scientific results and research in the process instead of just focusing winning the competition,” said Mr. Salonen. Asked if luck possibly played a factor in their tournament victory, Mr. Cordes explained his beliefs on the subject. “There’s a Swedish saying that goes: ‘Luck doesn’t give, it lends,’” Mr. Cordes said. “It’s nothing more than a short-term volatility.” In fact, several thousand hands were played between the different programs, eliminating any short-term benefits from luck. And to erase any doubt, tournament organizers then re-dealt the same hand but to opposing players. In the end, only the program with superior skills would come out on top.
The two partners met through a friend and immediately hit it off after learning of their mutual interests, including a love of poker. Both discovered that they even shared a mutual nickname growing up- Spock. The BluffBot was developed over the past several months through a series of testing, identifying weaknesses and modifying the program, Mr. Cordes said. With a rise in the game’s popularity, both men have said that they are interested in possibly developing the BluffBot for commercial use, but nothing concrete has materialized. In the meantime, the partners plan to continue developing the software with the hopes of one day being able to beat the pros. While the software is getting better each year, it still has several weaknesses that skilled poker players can exploit to defeat it. In the 2006 tournament, professional poker players, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami come out on top in head to head competitions against the University of Alberta’s poker bot program. Mr. Cordes believes BluffBot will be able to hold its own against top poker players within a few years. “Our goal is to create the Deep Blue of poker,” Mr. Cordes said, referring to the well-know chess software developed by IBM that defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. For those interested in challenging BluffBot2.0 to a game of heads-up poker, the software can be downloaded for free at www.bluffbot.com.
—Tony Krickl |
 
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August 29, 2007
August 29, 2007