Man Against Machine, Any Bets?

An amazing thing is now taking place in Vancouver, Canada. Two poker professionals, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, are locked in a Texas Hold 'em battle against a computer program, dubbed 'Polaris.' The two men are no poker beginners. Both Laak and Eslami are expert poker players with vast experience in the game. However, the computer is no fool either. The program was developed at the University of Alberta in Edmonton where the researches invested huge efforts to 'teach' the computer the secrets of poker.

The Texas Hold 'em competition between Polaris and the human poker pros is held at the annual global conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (IT). According to Onlinepokereport.com, there are are as many as 1,000 scientists attending the conference. I bet they are very curious about the outcome of the battle.

A researcher who helped develop Polaris said that there were already computers in the world capable of playing other games, such as checkers and backgammon. Amazingly enough, in 1997, an IBM computer Deep Blue succeeded in beating the legendary Russian world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

The event was a sensation extensively covered by media from all over the world. It was the first time a machine proved to be a more successful player than a man...Even though the idea is generally clear, there are still several things I, personally, don't get. First, poker has this emotional factor that is very difficult for any machine to figure out. I refer to bluffing. How can a computer guess when his human opponent is bluffing? As far as I know, no modern computer can read tells...

Although Polaris is very good when it comes to mathematical calculations, which I admit form an integral part of poker, the human aspect of the game is truly out of its reach.The way I see it, people should not compete against computers but use their help when battling against other human players. This gives a huge advantage to any poker player who's smart enough to follow my advice. The machine will monitor all players' movements and give its users educated advice regarding their play, much like an advanced poker tracker. Imagine how easy winning at poker would become. The downside of such practice is the fact that poker wouldl probably lose its appeal. If winning the game will require no effort on the part of the player, the game would become somewhat boring. Don't you think?