Hmm. I don't think that is how it works. I don't think these computer programs are permitted to take into account special knowledge in their AIs. I suppose the interviewee in this article could be lying, but I don't see that as the highest probability hypothesis.
You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? Because it is illegal!!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...
>You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment?
No I didn't make that generalized statement. What I did say was that in this particular case that hypothesis is of low probability:
1) The people building the machines don't make money on poker playing, but by selling them to casinos
2) The article explicitly mentions that they actually have a machine that plays too well and that they've had to dumb it down to give players enough of an incentive to play. So there's no need to cheat.
3) Casinos are heavily regulated and their hardware is known to be verified more thoroughly than both ATMs and voting machines. You don't risk a billion dollar business to nickel and dime a few customers.
4) Casinos make their money milking gambling addicts, making sure they don't take their money fast enough that they'll give up. Fixing the games would only reduce their variance not their final outcome and they have enough scale that the variance isn't high at all.
>Because it is illegal!!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...
Adding a bunch of exclamations does not an argument make.
Sorry, not convinced. All that control and regulation applies to more important parts of society, and it does not work (NSA).
So, according to you, I, Mr. unbeatable hold'em player, can go to this machine, bet a million dollars and be sure that, in that perfect moment when I know I am going to crush it, it will not play tricks against me?
When I lose, how do I know? How can I be sure that it has not dealt itself favorably? It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me. It does not matter what the law says, which are the incentives, how they are generating profit, ... As long as the machine can theoretically deal itself a good hand, I am not playing it.
And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either.
>So, according to you, I, Mr. unbeatable hold'em player, can go to this machine, bet a million dollars and be sure that, in that perfect moment when I know I am going to crush it, it will not play tricks against me?
No, I never said you could be sure of that. What I do argue is that no one has much of an incentive to cheat you in this case.
>It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me.
Don't change the subject. The discussion was around if they were doing it. We all know it could be done, that's why we discussed this in the first place.
>And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either. Give me an independent dealer, and then we talk.
That's fine. You require 100% certainty of not cheating and this machine doesn't offer it. That is in no way an argument to say that they are in fact cheating. It's not even an argument to say that the probability that they are indeed cheating is very small (which is what I argued).
Parafrasing Clarke, "A sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from magic".
You, and nobody, will not notice small probabilistic variations. Whenever you discover it (let us say, 30 years from now), you will be told that there was a difficult to find bug in the random generator. Nobody will be prosecuted.
It could be a couple of lines of code in a subsystem somewhere, available only to a handful of engineers, and understood only by two of them - both of them with nice bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.
This is true but the Gaming Control Board audits the software and they are also audited by outside parties. Could they cheat? Of course. So can human dealers, rigged card shufflers, etc. But Las Vegas makes its money from table games, slot machines, and apparently poker machines that play so well you'd have to be a pro to win consistently. It's not in their best interest to cheat you. As always in life: your mileage will vary.
I had the same thought. Unfortunately, the article doesn't make it crystal clear how much information the neural net uses to bet against you. It would be patently unfair if it actually knew your hand. According to the article, this is not the case.
I suspect it does perfectly count cards that it has seen in its hand or community cards. This seems okay as well-trained human players can do the same. I suspect the machine would get even more play if this were obvious, maybe if it played at a table with a real dealer and could read community cards on the table. The technology to do this certainly exists.
Counting cards in a poker game is really trivial, even for novice players, since you shuffle the deck after each hand, and in Texas Hold-em, once a card is exposed it is not taken out of play until the hand is over (unlike, say, stud games). All you have to do to count cards is look at your hand and look at the board.
Well, exactly! I have three aces, and the computer has double pairs. We are in the turn. I go all in!!!
The computer calls ... and deals itself a full house. I am bankrupt :( How do I know? How can I ever trust playing poker with a machine, when it is doing the dealing?
Or, let me put it this way: I will play any machine, no limit, if I can do the dealing (secretly, that is, as the machine is doing).
Another issue entirely is chess: no secret dealing going on. All are playing with the same in-game information.
Any Vegas casino found to be employing such machines would be subject to fines far, far beyond what they could ever win from these machines. Suspension of their gaming license is also a possibility. Casinos have huge disincentives to rig their games. I believe you severely overestimate the likelihood that a casinos regularly cheat, at least in Nevada.
That argument might of had more weight to it several years ago. The Ultimate Bet scandal does show that companies are willing to risk their entire business for comparitvely meagre rewards.
A default position of mistrust when it comes to gambling is a healthy and safe attitude.
The Ultimate Bet scandal was about employees cheating to make money for themselves not the company itself cheating. In this case employees cheating in this game wouldn't be able to profit themselves.
That would be fair, to be sure - or, to be precise, as fair as playing any other table in the casino. The dealer can still be cheating, but doing that in the open does not raise any further suspicions as any other table in the casino would raise.
You could still have the problem with a human dealer. There are many ways to cheat at dealing cards, and a very skilled human could be able to do it without being detected.
1) This is (fixed) limit Hold'em; you can't suddenly go all-in.
2) You ask how you could trust the machine. It would be trivial to keep track of all hands played and show that in the situations like the one you describe, the computer only makes a full house the expected ~9% of the times.