What is the state of the art in Poker A.I. programming?

I know that a lot of people fear, and have feared "bots" in online poker for a long time. Personally, though I'm not sure whether I've played against bots, I certainly don't find them to be a problem so far. They haven't made the games too tough to beat, and the toughest players I've run into have definitely been human (some of the professional site sponsors for example).



Now, recently I downloaded a poker computer game to try it out: Poker Superstars III. I've never played such a game against computer opponents. The biggest problem with this game is that the opponents are terrible. They're rather bad at NL tourney format with high blinds, but that is their best game (suited to playing super loose and aggressive). When it comes to the Limit cash game, they're completely hopeless, worse than novices who learned the game yesterday.



It made me wonder. Are there any computer poker simulations which are capable of even barely competent play? Limit poker should be the easiest game to teach a computer. But how good is the best?



If we can teach a computer to play Chess at a Grandmaster level, shouldn't it be possible to teach it to play poker at the level of a competent amateur of three months playing experience?



What do you know about Computer Artificial Intelligence as applied to Poker?What is the state of the art in Poker A.I. programming?
trouble with AI programming for poker is that there is still an element of luck, where as Chess has all the moves pre-defined. A computer can extrapolate thousands of moves in advance and find the perfect move in chess because everything on the board is known there are no uncounted variables. In poker that's all there is, unknown variables. Humans think far better in abstract ways than a computer so we have a serious edge in those kinds of games. There are programs out there that can give an average player a hard time but nothing that a good or even an above average player can't beat routinely.What is the state of the art in Poker A.I. programming?
Actually you can, I created one called Entropy. www.entropy-poker-ai.com - Play it online for free and see for yourself!

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