Poker-AI.org

Pretty please? I recall an individual on the old site bringing up several ideas about a bots architecture that 1) I have never seen mentioned together and 2) I had already implemented in my bot. I really wanted to respond but the idea of having that much information publicly available about my bot is just unacceptable to me. I think that the inherent value in a restricted access fourm is for the topics members feel are too sensitive for the public fourm but not worth taking to your grave.

+1. In addition, I think its actually better for sharing. I'm not talking about trivial things like a preflop equity table with is already publicly available. However, to be honest, there are some things I wouldn't share in public forum, but would consider sharing in the private forum, for example code where a lot of effort went into or ideas/concepts that are currently not used but improve the state of the art significantly. The reason is that one spends a lot of time to get the stuff working. Sharing makes it available to all others instantly, while sharing in a private forum it's only available to the people that also contribute significant things, so you get something back.

Point taken. I'll set something up this week.

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Cheers.

I have to voice my strong opposition concerning this suggestion.

I really dislike this attitude, to be frank. It will stifle the exchange of ideas. It's an insurmountable fact that some people will contribute more than others. By "privatizing" the exchange of ideas, you will just lead to a more stale & inactive community - on top of its exclusiveness. Some people may never even come up with an idea to share, because they were never inspired by the greats of experienced botters. That's not the spirit of exchange that this site should seek to promote.

In short, I think this will do more harm than good. I don't believe you have much to lose from sharing the ideas, but there is potentially a lot to gain. If you really want to exchange ideas in a controlled way, you can always do it in private messages or somewhere else.

I'm agree with you. But as private ideas exchange is still possible, why not let people sharing these ideas on private forum. You (or newer botters) gain the possibility to get access to the private forums and to discussions history following the rules to grant the access.

About the board structure, can the AI Research forum be divided in two sub-forums: Equilibrium and exploitive strategy ? I think it may be clearer to follow discussions according to the strategy we are implementing.

I don't agree on that one, either . Those two strategies are definitely not mutually exclusive. You can have various variations, from boot-time decision between the two, to very fine distinction in very deep levels of the decision tree. It's more of a continuum even on the decision itself - I would even consider it a bipolar value of very exploitive on one side, and very balanced on the other.

I have difficulties to see the continuum in bipolar values . Anyway, I agree that some topics could overlap between the two strategies. So maybe a three subforums structure could be a solution: General (overlap the two other ones) , Exploitive and Equilibrium ? Or did I miss your point ?

Well you kinda seem to say that a strategy is either exploitive or balanced, while I'm saying that a strategy always has a exploitive and a balanced side, which are in an inverse relation with each other. Big difference.

I don't agree with you. If you compute a Nash Equilibrium strategy, your bot is surely not exploitive ! On the other way, a maximal strategy again a specific opponent is far away from equilibrium (unless your opponent play an equilibrium strategy). What you are talking about seems to me a meta-strategy balancing between both of them. In this case, you could read topics in the three subforums I proposed

I think that ideas are worthless and just worrying about that would be stupid (mostly).

But this is a very good point actually. Making the the implementation details of your bot more private by limiting the people who see what you (or anyone else) is talking about in the forums.

Your assumption is that everyone is willing to share the same amount of information in a public forum compared to a private forum and that's wrong in my opinion. Take this current example: I have worked on a new card/board abstraction technique which seems way better than the current ones. It took me a lot of time from concept over implementation to evaluation. Given I am a GTO freak, sharing this in a public forum would be a dominated strategy: people who never contributed something (for whatever reason) will be able to use the concept in their bots and improve it "for free" - possibly reducing my edge in the games. So why should I share it?
A private forum however, assuming only people who contributed stuff too, gets me something back: I can use concepts/ideas from others and those people are more likely to give valuable feedback and possibly improve my idea.

The same situation exists with poker players discussing hands/strategies. There are a lot of forums that offer these kinds of discussions and its really helpful if you start out with. However, as higher you play, you won't find a lot of valuable input in public forums anymore: all good highstakes players build similar private structures to discuss these things only with people that also contribute.

And to make it clear: it doesnt mean that everything which is really bot relevant should be private: you can still find all the basic stuff to build a solid bot in the public forum and then go from there; its more about the advanced stuff and if someone wants to have access to it, why shouldn't he "pay" with a contribution?

We are not about to granulize the forums even more, less subforums is better than more.
If you wish to distinctly mark your thread you can just use a clear title and/or tags such as [EQUILIBRIUM] or [EXPLOITIVE]. I don't want to force that on anyone though so it's not a rule. Another valuable tag might be [ABSTRACTION] since that's orthogonal to the previous two.

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Cheers.

Alright ! Thanks for the tag idea

I have an idea but will take a long time to implement.

There was talk in the old forum of creating a test server where people could test the bots against each other.

So create an online test bed that people can play against each other or built in bots. Have a leader board and the higher up on the leader board you are the more access you get in the forums. So maybe to get access to level 1 you have to at least beat the inbuilt bots.

Bob

What about the ppl that do not have a holdem AI but for instance a 7 card stud AI?

There is a plan to provide that in the future. For now you'll have to make due with the testbeds that are out there: SNG-Testbed, opentestbed or if you can still find it PokerAcademy.


There is no plan on granting access to restricted forums on any metrics such as beating a baseline bot. It's based on individual applications and then evaluation of your contribution in the public forum.

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Cheers.

The only one place I knew to download SNG-Testbed was in the old forum at the following address:
http://poker-ai.org/archive/www.pokerai ... &sk=t&sd=a

But the link seems broken. Is there any other place to download it ? Or can someone upload it again ?

I think a download section like the old ftp could be really valuable...

- Right click on the link
- Save Link as..
- Rename the file to xyz.zip
- Unzip

What spears said.
+ a download section is in the planning.

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Cheers.

It perfectly works. Thanks!