Principles of Knowledge Engineering and Reconstruction

cs6501: PoKER

RSS
  • Syllabus
    • Course Registration Survey
  • Projects
    • Warm-Up Project: West Virginia Hold’Em
    • Final Project
  • Schedule
  • Readings
  • Leaderboard

Recent Posts

  • Final Project Submission
  • Machine Learning Comparisons
  • Tuesday’s class: A Theory of the Learnable
  • Some poker bots available for download!
  • Plans for April 21th (updated)

Recent Comments

  • Als on Some poker bots available for download!
  • cbraley on Final Project Submission
  • Peter_C on Final Project Submission
  • Yuchen Zhou on Final Project Submission
  • Thom Noble on Assignment for 24 Feb

Archives

  • May 2011 (1)
  • April 2011 (11)
  • March 2011 (28)
  • February 2011 (17)
  • January 2011 (8)

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Assignment for 24 Feb

by David Evans on February 22nd, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Posted In: Assignments, Classes, Readings

Recall that Thursday’s class will be the Enigma talk by David J. Saltman in PHS 218. [Details]

To ensure that everyone is keeping up with the readings, everyone should post a comment (to this post) about the Rubin and Watson reading [reading post]. Your comment should either: (1) state three surprising things you learned from the paper (which may not include anything a previous comment has mentioned), (2) state one surprising/interesting thing you learned from the paper and ask a clear question based on something in the paper, or (3) provide a good answer to a question an earlier comment posed.

You should post your comment by Thursday (and should feel free, of course, to followup with additional comments later).

30 Comments

Why IBM’s next target should be a machine that plays poker

by David Evans on February 18th, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Posted In: News

There’s an article in Slate explaining how much more interesting it would be to build a champion poker player than a Jeopardy player: Jeopardy, Schmeopardy: Why IBM’s next target should be a machine that plays poker, Chris Wilson, Feb 15, 2011.


But it’s safe to say that the algorithms that were finally able to defeat Kasparov did not revolutionize the industry. Chess simply wasn’t the right challenge for the computer scientists. In fact, there are many other games at which computers are blisteringly incompetent, and whose mastery would, in fact, herald tremendous breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. One of those games is poker.

Somehow, I doubt IBM is going to invest millions of dollars to build a better poker bot though. Might not be such a great PR windfall as playing Jeopardy has been.

Comments Off

Plans for March 1st Class

by Peter_C on February 18th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Posted In: Classes

I will be giving an introduction to poker opponent modeling with a discussion on the opponent modeling system used in Loki.

Opponent Modeling in Poker: Billings, D. Papp, D. Schaeffer, J. Szafron, D. (opponent_modeling_in_poker_billings.pdf)

Class Slides: presentation

Comments Off

Reading

by David Evans on February 18th, 2011 at 3:04 am
Posted In: Classes, Readings

Here’s the new survey paper I mentioned in class today:

Jonathan Rubin, Ian Watson. Computer Poker: A review. Artificial Intelligence, 2011. [Proof PDF] [Final Version PDF (UVa only)]

Please read it before the next class.

Comments Off

Evolutionary Algorithm: Slides

by Yikan Chen on February 17th, 2011 at 10:15 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

For Feb 17th class:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/poker/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Evolutionary-Poker_revised.pptx

Thanks!

Comments Off

Welcoming our new computer overlords!

by David Evans on February 17th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Posted In: Announcements, Challenges

IBM’s Watson pulled off a resounding victory in the computer vs. Jeopardy champions! The computer did make some strange answers (e.g., “What is Toronto?????????” to a question about American cities), but was much faster than the humans on the easy questions (not so surprising) and did get many tricky questions right.

Here’s the New York Times article: Computer Wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, It’s Not.

The research definitely focused mostly on the question understanding and information retrieval aspects, but it seems to have had a very curious game theory strategy also, with its bet sizes and question choices. At the end of a Jeopardy game, there is a “Final Jeopardy” question where each player (there are 3 players) secretly writes down the amount she wants to wager (up to their current total). So, the leading player could guarantee a victory by betting the maximum amount and getting the answer correct. If a player answers incorrectly, they lose the amount they bet.

Challenge Problem! What is the optimal Final Jeopardy betting strategy? I think this is quite a difficult game theory question, especially since there are 3 players involved, and there is a likelihood that the probability of opponents answering the question incorrectly is correlated with the probability I will answer incorrectly (e.g., if the question is very difficult, it is likely all players will get it wrong; but if it is easy, everyone will answer correctly). An obvious first order strategy would be for the leading player to bet enough so her total would be 2b+1 where b is the total for the second highest player (call this bet x), player 2 should bet an amount y that is small enough so that (b – y) > (a – x), to win when all players are incorrect, but also worry about exceeding 2c+1 where c is the total for the third highest player. This is definitely not optimal, though, since the other players should adjust their strategies accordingly. Note that there is an extensive database of Jeopardy! games here, http://www.j-archive.com/, so you can analyze how poor most players betting strategies are, as well as the probabilities of different correctness outcomes for the final Jeopardy! question. (e.g., how often do all 3 get the answer correct or incorrect). They also have a Wagering Calculator, which seems to follow a strategy similar to the obvious strategy above.

Comments Off

Schedule Update

by David Evans on February 16th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Posted In: Announcements, Classes

Next Thursday (Feb 24), there will be an interesting talk on Enigma and cryptanalysis during our normal class time. So, instead of having class, I encourage everyone to go to the talk. The talk is 11am Thursday, Feb 24 in PHS 218.

I have adjusted the presentation schedule to move some of the presentations to later dates. If you have a problem with the new schedule, please let me know soon.

David J Saltman, Director, Center for Communications Research (IDA) – Princeton

Title: ENIGMA

Abstract: During World War II, the Germans used a mechanical coding machine that we call ENIGMA. Though it was thought to be “unbreakable”, in fact the Allies very often could break these codes and this fact was extremely important in winning the war. I will discuss this machine, and the ideas used to break it by first the Poles, and then the British as use of the machine changed. Another goal of the talk is to speak about career paths and summer opportunities for mathematics students working for the U.S. on modern versions of such problems.

Comments Off

Borel and Von Neumann Poker Model Slides

by mky7b on February 16th, 2011 at 2:25 am
Posted In: Classes, Uncategorized

The slides from the February 15 class are given below.

On_the_Borel_and_von_Neumann_Poker_Models.pptx

Comments Off

Project 1

by David Evans on February 13th, 2011 at 10:25 pm
Posted In: Announcements, Assignments

Project 1 is now posted. It is due March 10 (during Spring Break).

We will form teams for this in class Tuesday. If you would like to form your own team for this, you should notify me before class Tuesday.

Comments Off

Suggested Readings

by David Evans on February 11th, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Posted In: Announcements, Readings

I’ve added a page with some suggested readings: Readings. I will add more links to this page as the semester progresses. It is definitely not required that the papers you select be from this list, though, it is just meant as a starting point if you are looking for ideas.

Comments Off
  • Page 5 of 7
  • « First
  • «
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • »

©2011 cs6501: PoKER | Powered by WordPress with Easel | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑