A Las Vegas casino is holding a $100,000-grand-prize competition to design the world's best poker-playing algorithm. As Waxy so aptly put it, they're after the "Deep Blue of Texas hold-em."
The march of the machines will be celebrated in Las Vegas next month with the world's first money tournament for robots – and the $100,000 prize is drawing a handful of coders out of anonymity.
The emerging technology does more than raise the stakes for real people and online casinos. It also raises fundamental questions about how far computers have come in mimicking and improving on human behavior, and about how far they can go in the future…
[…P]oker bot design [is] fascinating to academics like Jonathan Schaeffer, a computing science professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who for 14 years has headed a project to build poker programs.
Schaeffer said cards were more likely than chess to produce computing approaches useful in the real world because poker players must deal with incomplete information. But before such research can contribute dramatically to solving real-world problems, Schaeffer said, it has to solve the challenge of poker – and that's several years away.
(via Waxy)