March 2016: The Annual Computer Poker Competition saw poker bot ‘Baby Tartanian 8’ emerging as the winner. It comes from the genius minds at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, specifically Ph.D. student Noah Brown and professor Tuomas Sandholm.
The bot has been upgraded from its previous version ‘Baby Tartanian 7’. The software used in the bot aimed to solve the characteristic of incomplete information that is inherent to poker. The creators have tried to take this a step further and go past poker when it comes to making assumptions due to incomplete information.
Noah Brown said, “This algorithm is not specific to poker. It should be generally applicable to any strategic interaction where you have multiple agents and asymmetric information.”
The Computer Poker Competition is a poker tournament of No Limit Hold’em that is played by computer programmed bots in the heads up format. The competition was founded in 2006 and has been a great success so far. The first ever bot to get accolades as being the best one ever made goes to Cepheus, built by author Michael Craig.
The bots aim to create the most perfect poker game possible with the highest odds of winning. Another testament to how technology is defying all the odds to perfect imperfections.
