193329
submission
FullyCompletely writes:
During the upcoming 2007 AAAI Conference in Vancouver, a team from the University of Alberta will compete against human poker experts Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami for $50,000 in the first Man-Machine Poker Competition. The University of Alberta Poker Research Group are the authors of Hyperborean, the winner of the AAAI 2006 Computer Poker Competition. The 2007 competition is just around the corner, and the results will be announced at AAAI from July 23-24th in Vancouver, Canada. During AAAI, the team's newest program — Polaris — will also compete live in duplicate poker matches against Phil and Ali. The game is Limit Texas Hold'Em, and four 500-hand sessions will be run. More details about the competitors and the duplicate poker format can be found at the match website. The purpose of the AAAI Computer Poker competition and this Man-Machine match is to further AI research. The programs in last year's competition made a good showing, and this year's contenders are expected to be very strong. Competitions in other games (Chinook against Marion Tinsley in Checkers, Deep Blue against Kasparov in Chess) have shown that computers can beat human opponents in deterministic, perfect information games, but poker is different — there's hidden information and stochastic outcomes. Is it time for computers to challenge human dominance in Poker, too?
193297
submission
Monty writes:
As previously reported by Cmdr Taco in February, 2006 (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/28/14 41229) looks like Adam Vitale finally decided to plead guilty (http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN 1120537620070611) to violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 in federal court in New York City. Is his cohort Moeller next?