Didn't These People See The Terminator?
2007-11-13 18:23:00
By:
Gene Bromberg
A few months ago
you probably heard about a "Man vs. Machine" poker game that pitted human beings Phil Laak and Ali Eslami against a computer designed by scientists at the University of Alberta. The computer, dubbed "Polaris", more than held it's own in a series of Limit Hold-Em matches against it's hominid opponents. And while there's considerable proof that Laak might actually be from Jupiter, Polaris' results showed that the gap between carbon- and silicon-based brains is narrowing.
And that's potentially a bad thing. Because there are unscrupulous people out there who use computers, or "bots", to
play online poker. Bots don't get tired, they don't tilt, and you could theoretically have dozens of them playing at the same time. The problem with bots is that they aren't very good at
poker. The problem for poker is that, as Polaris' results show, they're getting better. Fast.
A
post by Ian Ayres at the
Freakonomics blog paints a dark picture. Ayers opines that supersmart bots could spell the end of
online poker, as they clobber their less-skilled human opponents into submission. It's one thing to sit down at a table and get your head handed to you by some smart-ass from Des Moines or Helsinki or Buenos Aires. It's another to lose your roll to a bank of servers chirping and whirring in some undisclosed location.
One would hope that the Alberta scientists would keep their mouths shut and not share their damaging research. That is, of course, a bit naive on my part. Ayers comes out and actually says the U.S. government should sponsor research into this area, as a means to what Ayers calls "virtual temperance". Create a bot that can beat the majority of human poker players, and the Feds won't need to bother with anti-gambling laws--players will give up on their own accord. Sounds like a good use of taxpayer dollars, developing ways to ruin an activity millions of people enjoy. Maybe after that the government could commission a study to find ways to make physical intimacy less pleasurable.
Of course,
online poker sites won't take an invasion of bots lying down. There are lots of smart people considering the problem and, while there's money to be made running an army of bots, there's also money to be made in opposing them. If
online poker becomes legal perhaps the government could actually do some GOOD and make bot-bossing illegal, perhaps making it a crime along the lines of spamming. And while I think that the penalty for those who engage in wide-spread spamming should be lethal injection (for starters), some teeth in an anti-bot law would both protect consumers and allow players to enjoy the game. That makes such good sense that there's probably a zero-percent chance of it every seeing the light of day.
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