A.I. Has Changed Poker, and Maybe Killed Its ‘Soul’
Some of the top poker players today make moves that would have been seen as foolish even 15 years ago. Back then, they would been seen as "fish," or weak players, and invited to games every night. Today, those unorthodox moves are a good sign that the player has adopted strategies from artificial intelligence, which has revolutionized the game, writes Keith Romer in the New York Times Magazine. In fact, "conquered" is the word used in the headline of the in-depth look at the changes. Players now have access to computer programs such as PioSOLVER, which run through the nearly innumerable possible outcomes of a particular hand in a particular game and suggest the strategy—when to bluff or check, how much to raise and when, etc.—that is most likely to pay off over time. The answers are sometimes surprising to traditional players, but the algorithms don't lie.
Players can't use such tools during an in-person tournament, of course—online games are another story—but they can replay hands on the computer afterward to see whether they did the right thing. ...
Piotrek Lopusiewicz, the programmer behind PioSOLVER, counters by arguing that the new generation of A.I. tools is merely a continuation of a longer pattern of technological innovation in poker. Before the advent of solvers, top online players like Polk used software to collect data about their opponents’ past play and analyze it for potential weaknesses. “So now someone brought a bigger firearm to the arms race,” Lopusiewicz says, “and suddenly those guys who weren’t in a position to profit were like: ‘Oh, yeah, but we don’t really mean that arms race. We just want our tools, not the better tools.’”
Besides, for Lopusiewicz, solvers haven’t so much changed poker as revealed its essence. ...
See the full story here: https://www.newser.com/story/315904/ai-has-changed-poker-and-maybe-killed-its-soul.html
