NEW YORK (AP) – A computer program that taught itself to play poker has created nearly the best possible strategy for one version of the game, showing the value of techniques that may prove useful to help decision-making in medicine and other areas.
The program considered 24 trillion simulated poker hands per second for two months, probably playing more poker than all humanity has ever experienced, says Michael Bowling, who led the project.
The resulting strategy still won’t win every game because of bad luck in the cards. But over the long run – thousands of games – it won’t lose money; “We can go against the best (players) in the world and the humans are going to be the ones that lose money,” said Bowling, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
In any case, Bowling doubts the poker strategy will let anybody make a fortune on the game. It applies only to heads-up limit Texas hold ’em, a game which has waned in popularity over the past seven years or so, he said. Even online, the stakes tend to be small and “you’d be winning a few dollars, not raking in millions.”
He and colleagues report their work in a paper released Thursday by the journal Science.