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August 14, 2006, 07:41 AM ET
Team Studies Artificial Intelligence With Poker-Playing Computer
Computers may have defeated the world’s best chess masters, but they aren’t ready to take on human poker players, says Jonathan Schaeffer, of the University of Alberta. That’s because computer scientists have not yet figured out how to write programs that can make informed decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information, he told the Canadian Press News Service.
Mr. Schaeffer, who is chairman of the university’s computer-science department and holder of a Canada research chair in artificial intelligence, was part of the team that designed Hyperborean, a computer that took top prizes a tournament for poker-playing programs, held last month by the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (The Wired Campus, July 6).
Poker is more challenging than chess, Mr. Schaeffer said, because in the latter you can look at the board and “have complete knowledge of the game.”
“But in the real world, knowing everything is just so rare,” he added. “Everything we do all day long is all about partial information. So poker’s much more representative of what the real world’s like, and in that sense it becomes a much harder problem. The end result is that we’re going to learn more in terms of research outcomes from poker than we ever did from chess.”
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