Man Versus the Machine

The year is 2005 A.D. and the internet has become an essential element of human existence. It controls national defense, it is essential for tradeand commerce, and most importantly – it has created the most exciting era of poker the world has ever known. But suddenly, and without warning, a secret guild of profiteering uber-geeks have emerged from the bedrooms of their moms’ houses with armies of robots, programmed to destroy the chipstacks of mankind.

Humanity has one chance left. A mysterious hooded hero is the only thing that stands in the way of the implacable rise of the machines. Phil ‘Unabomber’ Laak has made a stand and challenged the poker bots for dominance of the green felt. Tirelessly, this unlikely hero battled head to head with the world’s most sophisticated poker robots in a contest which will go down in the annals of history as The World Poker Robot Championship 2005.

Sound scary? It is. Poker bots play a mathematically perfect game, and the newest generation of bots can utilize very non-computer poker skills like bluffing, catching tells and switching gears. In short, they’re becoming more and more like HAL in Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the super computer with the sinisterly homoerotic voice that attains consciousness and embarks on a murderous rampage.

But this is not science fiction. Poker robots, usually just called ‘bots’, are out there; and they have become so prevalent and are so advanced that online poker rooms now employ special IT teams to identify robot play and lock the accounts of their programmers. GoldenPalace.com is one such company, but instead of sweeping this pariah under the carpet, they decided to set it on center stage, and invite six of the world’s best pokerbot programmers to pit their bots in mortal combat at this year’s WSOP.

GoldenPalace.com’s World Poker Robot Championship, offered a $100,000 prize purse for the designer of the best poker robot, and provided the arena for the bots to play against each other in a controlled environment at a virtual table.

The scene is surreal. Binion’s during the WSOP; hundreds of spectators are here to catch a glimpse of poker’s royalty, but are diverted by the spectacle of poker bots battling each other for the chance to tangle heads up with the Unabomber. There are plasma screens set up to display the action, allowing the audience to see the bot’s hole cards, but shielding that information from the bots themselves. Does it make good television? It sure does, and before long people were lining up chairs to watch the robot wars as if they had forgotten that the WSOP was going on upstairs.

The poker bot wars were a two-and-a-half-hour robotic tango of virtual chip-shifting (there’s a sentence you won’t hear very often). But it didn’t take long to establish dominant players on this battlefield. Three robots were in the recycle bin at the half way mark, and Gobot, a rule-based bot that analyses its opponents and makes decisions based on simulated play, was severely short stacked.

Before long, Gobot was also on the scrap heap, leaving software engineer Print Given’s PokerProBot and network administrator Brian Edward’s BenBot in heads up competition. Chip counts undulated back and forth, and the crowd of spectators became more and more engrossed in the virtual surrealness.

The programmers seemed calm, despite major swings in their bots’ chipstacks, and were seen to be making constant tweaks and adjustments to their bot’s logic, as they spotted patterns or weaknesses in their opponents. But of course, in poker there can only be one winner, and Print Given’s PokerProBot became the first ever silicon champion. “We were pretty even throughout the day,” Print tells us, “and like in any game of poker, when the blinds increase it’s down to who gets the cards.”

Given’s PokerProBot isn’t just an exhibition-match bot. Print’s cyber-pro is the second income earner in his household, and consistently brings home the bacon while Print is working his day job. “PokerProBot can make two or three times my money if I put it in a ring game before I go to work. It is also consistently finishing in the top 75% when I put it in an online tournament.” But it’s not always easy for Print to find a game now that his reputation as a programming mastermind has reached the public domain. He explains: “I had one of my poker accounts locked before I came out here to the World Series of Robot Poker. The poker room read my name in an article about my bot, and then froze my account. They won’t let me play there any more.”

But that doesn’t spell the end of PokerProBot. Print is planning to offer a commercial version of the PokerProBot on his website, PokerProBot.com, as poker advisor software, helping people to learn to play mathematically perfect poker.

But whatever your feelings on the ethics of using pokerbots online, the question remains as to whether a mathematically perfect game is more important in Texas Hold’em than the ‘art’ of the game. Phil Laak didn’t think so as he squared up against Print Givens’ champion bot in heads up competition. Phil, as a human (albeit a slightly unusual one), gets tired (occasionally), needs to use the bathroom, and has to put a hood over his head when things get hairy. PokerProBot, barring a power cut, is good to go all day without fatigue.

Phil admits to being very interested in the technology behind artificial intelligence, and has delved into this dark science himself by downloading all the information available on the subject. “I have a degree in engineering, but there’s a lot of information on components of artificial intelligence, like neural netting, that is too mathematical for me to understand,” Phil told us. “If you look at professional backgammon, and I used to be a top 100-ranked backgammon player, there is no doubt that Snowy, the top backgammon software, can beat any human player in the world; and poker may be heading that way. The possibility of this happening in poker is very exciting. So I thought that this was worthy of a pilgrimage. I went up to the University of Alberta and hung around with the guys in the math department who were working on their poker AI project.”

So our hero is armed with information about poker AI, is one of the top poker pros in the world and shifts gears during play faster than a Formula 1 driver, but does this mean that man can eat the machine?

“I figure that I am a 55%-60% favorite going in, but anything can happen. I have played the university of Alberta bot and I expect that PokerProBot will have some of the same weaknesses.”

Not since John Henry, the steel driving man, famously challenged a steam drill to a rock-walloping contest has humankind been so sorely put to the test. Throughout the first half of the match, man and machine were neck and neck. We all wondered if fatigue would play a factor and advantage the bot. But remember – this is Phil Laak, a top pro, and the Unabomber stayed sharp, as he scoured for chinks in PokerProBot’s defenses.

The tides began to turn. Laak swept up a few fat pots and took a dominant chip lead. With his chip lead, Laak was able to get down and dirty. The hood went up, and the crowd went wild. ‘Human, Human, Human!’ they chanted, and with the crowd behind him, Laak began to chop away at the silicon pro. But the cards seemed to favor the bot, and each time it looked like PokerProBot was headed for the reprogramming production line, it caught the cards it needed to survive. A normal man may have tilted, but with the reputation of the species squarely on his shoulders, our hooded hero kept his head and eventually felted that robot bitch straight to the green.

The crowd went wild: “Up with humans; down with robots!”

“There were weaknesses in the bot that I began to identify,” explains our savior. “If there wasn’t a lot of preflop heat, and if the flop came fat and good, like face cards, suited cards, aces; my bluff success-ratio was way higher than it should be against a human opponent.”

Sleep well readers, for Phil Laak is watching over us. This day will not be known as the day the robots took over. It is not a day of shame for mankind. The Unabomber, hooded sweatshirt pulled over his head, tied tight with the drawstring, is out there – defending the human species against poker bots. The world is safe... for now.