The US has managed to get other places to "bend over" for things like reporting on US citizenship financial holdings by threatening to fine companies who do not report such info. Since almost every financial institution of any size has some US dealings, they are vunerable to this threat. Up until the Canadian government said "OK we will collect the data for you, big brother Sam, don't hurt us" the Canadian financial sector was all in a tizzy trying to figure out how it could prove to Uncle Sam it was not harbouring undeclared citizens, figuring out how to provide the info that Sam wanted on the declared citizens that would violate privacy laws, and figuring out how to divest themselves of clients who were US citizens to get rid of the complicated reporting requirements. I know of at least one international venture capitol fund that refuses investments from USA citizens for exactly this reason.

While the USA may be morrally bankrupt, the financial weight that they can bring to bear on any institution is pretty large.

Well, I think that is only true for countries that have a tax treaty with the USA. And it only covers wages and "earned income", and you are still required to file onerous records regardless of your income.

The USA is virtually the only country in the world that requires non-resident citizens to file tax returns and pay USA taxes on all of their world income regardless of where it is earned. Canadians living in the USA do not pay taxes to Canada, or even have to file Canadian tax returns. The reverse is not the case. Even giving up your US citizenship doesn't remove this burden entirely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I would disagree, you would be a fool to enter into a business relationship with someone you do not have at least a bit of trust in. The contract gives you some potential way of recovering some of your costs if things go bad, and raising the cost to both parties in behaving badly, but the contract doesn't really protect you from someone really trying to rip you off. You need to trust: that they are who they say that they are; that you will be able to find them afterwards if things go badly; that they will eventually be able to pay if the court case goes against them; that the courts will read the contract the way you think they should; and a host of other items. The fact is that most people in most situations are quite trustworthy, and most of us trust the rest of us to behave reasonable in most situations.

Businesses that do not show enough trust in their suppliers and customers end up incurring extra expenses because of that lack of trust, perhaps making them less competitive. Of course businesses that show too much trust may end up with extra losses leading to their demise, so there is some sort of balance between the two extremes.

Good point.

I don't think you use the phrase "optimum strategy" the same way I would. While it is true that psychology could infleuence how your oponent might play, if you have the game solved, the oponent's play does not matter. For 4x4 TTT, a winning strategy is outlined here http://all-r-math.blogspot.ca/... which also references Zermelo's theorem showing that "For any finite two-player games of perfect information in which the players move alternatingly and in which chance does not affect the decision making process, one of the players will always have a non-losing strategy. If the game cannot end in a draw, then this non-losing strategy is a winning strategy." Physchology does not enter into it for these types of games.

It seems as though the term "optimum strategy" is being used in the context of "Perfect Play"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But I digress. If in fact the robot is using a "perfect play" strategy, as defined above, then knowing it's strategy won't help. The optimal strategy against "perfect play" is by definition also "perfect play" - any other strategy against perfect play is sub-optimal. It is true (as referenced above) that "perfect play" will never exploit the weaknesses of non-perfect play, but that does not mean that "perfect play" provides any weaknesses that can be exploited by some other strategy.

So, it looks like the site has recovered - have you played yet? Have you been able to consistently win? http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/

I guess we should really read the articles to find out what they classify as "optimal strategy".

I could believe that there exist strategies that would be effective against certain players/strategies than their "optimal strategy" (by "more effective" I suppose I mean "would beat them faster"), but that does not mean that their "optimal strategy" against any oponent does not exist.

On what basis do you make the claim "The programmers assume an optimal strategy for poker, but there is no such optimum strategy as such."?

Tick-tack-toe, chess, and go all clearly are not "games of skill" if you have the knowledge of all possible board configurations and their interconnections. For chess and go it is not clear when (if ever) our storage and calculating abilities will completely be able to map out the space, but the space is defined. Since there is no chance element involved it is easier to see how knowledge of the space translates into the optimal moves.

For games like poker, craps, and rock-paper-sissors(-lizard-Spock?), it does become a bit more difficult to define "optimal" since each hand or round is non-deterministic, so there is no possiblity of guaranteeing a win in any particular round. In RPS, there is a strategy that is guaranteed to win at least 50% of the time, against any possible other strategy. Even knowing that your opponent is using this strategy does not give you enough information to consistently beat it. Why do you think that such a strategy does not exist for poker?

Is there a name for one-card poker? Each player gets one card, you bet/call/raise/fold and you are done. Has that been "solved"? A quick web search turns up a three-card-deck variant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which has been analyzed back in 1950. Is there some qualitative difference to suggest that more complex forms of poker cannot be analyzed in a similar way?

But I don't think you are playing enough hands to really get any useful data. How many hands do you think you need to get data from in order to be able to draw any strong conculsions about the bot's hand based on their bets? And you get no useful data when it folds as I assume you don't get to see their hand then.

And it doesn't really matter anyway - you could know exactly what the bot would do in any situation (by getting a copy of the 11TB of lookup tables), and it doesn't give you any advantage without knowing the hidden cards.

If the authors are correct and they have an optimal playing strategy, the opponent can play any way they want and it doesn't make the robot's job any more difficult - in the long run the optimal strategy will not be beaten by any other strategy.

Of course I could be wrong in my understanding. Do you think your playing is good enough to beat it? Are you planning on giving it a go when the website it not crushed under the weight of everyone else trying to test it out? http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/

Having brute forced all possible combinations, you still only know what cards have been revealed - so the betting strategy comes out in terms of odds to follow when betting: in this situation do X 5% of the time and Y 35% of the time and Z 60% of the time. Knowing what the the robot does does not really give you a lot of info about what the robot's hand is.

I suspect that the rules the robot follows (without reading the article - where's the fun in that?) are not of the form "In situation S(1234) do response R(456)" but rather are "In situation S(1234), 22% of the time do R(456) and 78% of the time do R(678)". Even if you know exactly what the algorithm is, you wil not be able to tell much about the robot's hand by seeing what its bets are.

Game theory types of strategies quite often have this "Do X 20% of the time and Y 80% of the time" nature, especially for games where there is incomplete knowledge.

I've enjoyed Gladwell's books. It is a shame he does seem to have some significant conflicts of interest in much of what he has written.

The engineering needed to mount big pannels on a solid framework at a set angle is much less complicated than one that is able to be moved, particularly if you desire those large panels to be safe in expected high winds. The timing system is probably only a miniscule fraction of the cost.

80/80? Sometimes it can be as high as 120/120, but it can also drop to 30/30 if you factor in all the potential benifits of having someone looking out for your interests in addition to their own.

You can't make everyone happy every time, so you are supposed to negotiate so that both people feel that they are better off together than they are separate. In a healthy relationship ometimes that means you choose to do things their way, and sometimes it means that they do it your way, and sometimes it means that you both do it some third way.

A key to "making it work" to noticing when things are sliding towards unfairness and resentment. If one partner is bothered by dirty dishes just a bit more than the other one, it can easily degenerate to one person washing the dishes the vast majority of the time. Similar for sweeping or picking up the untidy stuff laying around. Possible options are negotiated chore lists, alternating cleaning duties or other such things (make a big list of everything that people do, one person divide it into two lists, and the other person choses which one they will do - don't forget things like servicing the car, doing the taxes, and anything else you can think of that you want to share responsibilty over, and revisit on a regular basis)

If you are not working on this type of thing early in a partnership, it could prove to be very difficult to "fix" things once one or both of you get tired of the current situation. Like anything important in your life, to do it well require active engagement.

A full trial could have ruled him "not guilty" (which is not the same as "innocent"). The grand jury decided that there was not enough evidence to justify a trial, which is arguably a stronger statement than being found "not guilty" at trial, but still is not the same as being ruled "innocent".

This could actually work in your favour, as the resulting news coverage could increase your legitimate business, and put pressure on the enablers upstream to do something about it.