No, Really, I Got My PhD. For Playing Poker Online
from the uh,-yeah,-it's-my-thesis... dept
We’ve noted in the past the popularity of online poker among college students, a trend that is a bit worrisome. We’ve also written about the growing popularity of poker bots — programs that try to play better hands of poker (even to the point where the real “challenge” in online poker is in tweaking your bot, not in playing your hand). So, it really should come as no surprise to see college researchers starting to look at “academic” projects to build better poker bots. As the article notes, it can be seen as a challenge even more difficult than creating chess playing computer systems, since there’s a lot of unknown information that needs to be processed as well. Still, if new legislation makes it a felony to play online poker, will this research become illegal as well?
Comments on “No, Really, I Got My PhD. For Playing Poker Online”
I got my minor in Craps.
Raise the ante
I’ll see your minor, and raise you a major; ah, hell with it, I’m all in, its a PhD or bust!
Easy if
Yes, getting a PhD in the topic is easy… provided your mastery of Lebesgue Measures, Markov Chains, Doob’s Theorem, the distinction between Convergence by Probability and AS Convergence, Dirichlet L-series, Poisson Processes, and Cauchy Criterions. Of course, you find gamma integrals more fun than poker, and you would rather skip sex to compute the partial degrees of freedom for a non-central chi square distribution, wouldn’t you? I knew you would.
Re: Easy if
hahahaha go back to /. !!!
Re: Easy if
I’m all in.
You should figure out why you should sponsor me in the WSOP every year for the rest of your life, starting now.
We have a week.
Crunch those numbers friend.
Now that make sense.
Cast Out Your Old Tired Expectations.
Poker is art not math. My pet coyote knows that.
Re: Easy if
Damn it dorphus….I love it when you talk dirty…….
bots?
do poker bots like their liquor in the front and poker in the rear too?
But I know what you're thinking.
I left out contiguity, local asymptotic normality, Hotelling t-distributions, and Hilbert spaces. What would proper foreplay be if it weren’t for Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds, Canonical Forms, and 4th-degree Taylor expansions? Surely we bow before the power of the bootstrap, for we are powerless before Prohorov’s Weak Compactness Theorem.
…and a partridge in a pair of trees…
have a little too much time on our hands dorpus? you should be studying these things instead of copying them out of your textbooks…
to put it in slightly simper terms than dorphus, just wondering why the growing trend of college students playing poker (obviously something we have a bit of a vested interest in) is so “worrisome”?
Music to my ears...
First post sounded like you were into stochastic processes and mathematical finance, but that seemed less clear in the second (at least to my not very knowledgeable self). For what it’s worth (not much at all), my guess is you work in a bank (the place that pays best for all this knowledge)
Still, to build a bot of my own, I’d stick to:
1: playing a lot of online poker
2: discreet probabilities
3: artificial intell (if the bot can decide it’s strategy has been found out and develop a new one, that would be pretty nice)
A mathematical mind and poker experience are really the most important for this task, and imho the only thing worth a PHD would be developing the AI.
Now look what you’ve done, I feel like grabbing a math book now…
to put it in slightly simper terms than dorphus, just wondering why the growing trend of college students playing poker (obviously something we have a bit of a vested interest in) is so “worrisome”?
Re: collegpokerassn
re: just wondering why the growing trend of college students playing poker is so “worrisome”?
That depends on how many kids you’re putting through college.
Jokes aside, I really don’t see anyone worried about it and who tf cares about PhD’s these days anyway — most of the rich folk I know dropped out of whatever they were into to go get rich.
Show me results, not degrees (and cash me out).
Re: Re: collegpokerassn
Will attitudes like yours feed a gambling epidemic? College kids thinking that they “don’t need degrees”, therefore ruining their finances on poker games, and left unable to get jobs?
Or do we need more PhD’s to investigate the phenomenon of addictive behaviors and reduce the damage of addictive behaviors to society? Do we want to live in a neanderthalic society where a lucky few make billions, while everyone else is left in the dust? Or can we create a more fair society where people are rewarded in direct proportion to their work?
Re: Re: Re: collegpokerassn
Re: Re: Re: collegpokerassn
Hey dorphus — its completley ridiculous to think you can get a job simply because you have a degree. As a business owner I have seen more people succeed from hard work than from their education. Truthfully, fresh college grads roll off the street weekly thinking their education is of value to me, as if they have paid their dues and now I owe them.
You would leach off the success of the hard work of others, for a more “fair” soceity “rewarded in direct proportion” — Marxist words if ever there were any.
There are no “lucky few” who make billions — Luck is your crutch, your excuse for not succeeding where others have.
And yes, I have an education, more degrees than I need. Your PhDs who need to study addictive behaviors don’t do it for the “betterment of society” they do it for a f*ing paycheck, and then make an argument for another study (to keep their job).
Get off your altruistic horse and see what really makes the world turn — hard work and money.
Re: Re: Re:2 collegpokerassn
You mean you’re joining the big welfare scam called “starting a business”, when these self-righteous business owners knowingly start failed businesses so they can make their millions in bankruptcy protection? Or for the 1% of businesses that do succeed (sounds like gambling?), should we follow their blind hubris, believing what they want to believe, and paying dearly in the long run because they were wrong?
You would leach off the success of the hard work of others, for a more “fair” soceity “rewarded in direct proportion” — Marxist words if ever there were any.
So do you oppose working hard to make more money? Should businessmen just be forked over a welfare check from the government for starting a worthless company? I hold you responsible for your own words — after all, you oppose education.
There are no “lucky few” who make billions — Luck is your crutch, your excuse for not succeeding where others have.
You mean CEOs of companies who make billions are not clubby little affairs in which friends give each other jobs, for the honor of doing nothing?
And yes, I have an education, more degrees than I need. Your PhDs who need to study addictive behaviors don’t do it for the “betterment of society” they do it for a f*ing paycheck, and then make an argument for another study (to keep their job).
Funny, if you knew public health, you would know that a paycheck mentality wouldn’t last long in this field. People who want more money can go work for pharmaceuticals or insurance companies whenever they want to. Grants are very hard to get in public health, and only the most dedicated researchers survive. Research into addiction disorders are to help people, including businessmen, from their self-destructive behaviors. Do we want to live in a society where CEOs plunder billions from the government to feed their cocaine habits, or a society where people who do honest work make more?
poker
The issue is that there are probably a lot of college kids that don’t see poker as a game of skill, they see it as gambling, and probably lose a lot of many because of it, and most likely these kids don’t belong to your organization. Personally, as a poker player, I think its great, more fish for the rest to fry, but I imagine thier parents, (the ones footing the bill a lot of the time) might not agree with me.
PS, leave dorphus alone he was just trying to point out that sometimes things sound “stupid” when in fact they are highly complicated, and require much dedication and skill from the academic sector, which these days rarely gets the respect that it deserves.
correction
Lose a lot of MONEY, not many, sorry.
The author should apologize for posting this story.
In response to Adrien, it just so happens that youre magical “artificial intell,” as you casually refer to it, is based largely on math and computer science concepts that you can’t begin to comprehend.
If having a goal, a holy grail, for struggling to understand, AND APPLY, ideas that 99% of the world’s population has never even heard of is worrisome, let’s shut down the world’s collection of facilities for higher education.
No, it wont
No Stupid, it wont be illegal to do this kind of research. DOING it on a site and winning money will be though. But if legality was your concern… you wouldn’t be gambling online in the first place… you know it’s illegal, right?
“Still, if new legislation makes it a felony to play online poker, will this research become illegal as well?”
Of course it won’t. The new legislation won’t outlaw playing poker online. What it will outlaw is gambling online(poker or otherwise). In states that don’t allow gambling, poker isn’t illegal now. The thing that is illegal is gambling using poker. Now most of those states don’t enforce gambling laws against individual citizens having a poker night at their house. They usually only go after organized commercial gambling. But just because they don’t enforce a law under certain conditions doesn’t invalidate the law.
The point is, poker isn’t illegal anywhere in the US. Gambling is illegal in most states.
Response of sorts
STFU, great comment. I great leap ahead for the civilized man. Online gambling, convenience gambling as it is called, is nothing more the micro-domestic redistribution of wealth. This is most unfortunate as I have watched dozens of close friends throw theirselves at chance only to be dealt the fate of the unfortunate. But if the hosts of these “sites” pay tayes, eh.., well then it looks like the college bound boys and girls with so generously retiring the baby boomers with some nice government compensation. However, dorpus couldn’t be any more right here. We NEED to understand the implications of addictive behavior. Do I miss the days of the merit based society were we embraced prodestant worth ethic and only navigated chance. It seems the tides have turned, chance will navigate in and out of the pockets of the already frugal lifestyles of the college bound. Take into account I whitness this on a first hand basis as a sophomore at CMU. Let there be no mistake, this is real, this is a problem.
he said – that`s some chip you have on your shoulder. Boy, you sound bitter. I guess it`s down to one of two things:
1/ you are uneducated, and/or
2/ your parents ignore(d) you.
dorphus you are stupid and you missed the point
It is book worm moronic fools like you that lack common sense that should get hit by a truck. I guess you need to feel important and special because you probably still failed to start a business, or got a good job and needs to spend more time in school. I was a CS major (was -because I did graduate with honors btw) . Why babble markov models off to people on this site? And truly, is it completely necessary? The truth is no. If you have passion and desire, you will probably more likely than not develop a similar algorithm or theory. -not having it spoon fed to uncreative garbage like yourself that still missed the point of what other people were trying to tell you. And stop feeding off of statistics you stupid fool. Walk the Earth. What you are saying is that my Mercedes and my condo on the beach in Waikiki were bought from government welfare or bankruptcy? I think not. It was because of my successful business and my passion for computer science, not the education.
So what you are saying is that I am the one percent? Hell no, I am the person that believed, tried, and succeeded. Get a job, walk the earth, do something then read fact sheets.
Dorpus' defense
I find the aforementioned trully sickening, and to a certain degree I pity the man above me. Dorpus has been only one providing substancial arguments here. All the replies have simply been tangential ad hominem attacks of sorts, which contribute nothing to the conversation of the issue at hand, nor for any readers of this forum, nor for mankind. In fact, it is the man above and people like nono that we can now thank for knowing that we are all now less intelligent for having read their insights. So thank you gentlemen, and do use the term loosely.
Case in point:
“you are uneducated (followed by) your parents ingnored you”
How does this detract credibility from the argument? It only substantiates it because the commenter here is incapable of engaging in real substancial discourse.
“It is book worm moronic fools that lack common sense..”
Book worm is a term loosely used to describe an education gap. In fact, “student” could easily be substituted here. While at the end we see a play here on one of the greatest misconceptions of the uneducated. The commenter believes that because a man posses what he would call “book smarts” that he is incapable of possessing “street smarts” ie. common sense. You are sorrily mistaken my friend, there are those of us who can be in both schools of thought at once, doesn’t that send chills down the back of your spine?
“Walk the Earth”
I really don’t know what this hoping to accomplish.
“It was because of my successful business and my passion for computer science, not the education”
Well if that isn’t a contradiction I don’t know what is. Your education has nothing to do with your claimed success? What good is a passion without the tool to address it (education)?
People, this is not a hard concept to grasp. We live in a merit-based society. Education, diligence and intuition pave the way to success. To clarify, the trully successful do not measure their worth in monetary value.
If you want my opinions on the ACTUAL article, you an read up and find Jason.
It is book worm moronic fools like you that lack common sense that should get hit by a truck. I guess you need to feel important and special because you probably still failed to start a business, or got a good job and needs to spend more time in school.
Hehehe, the rhetorical eloquence of businessmen, oh. In truth, I have had plenty of good jobs before. If there is any such thing as a “hardworking businessman” in this world, let me know — during my 10 years in the “real world”, including 5 in Silicon Valley, every businessman I ever met was someone who postured about “80 hour work weeks”, but in reality spent 20 hours a week in the office, yakking to their friends on the cell phone, going to the gym for “executive meetings”, and made employees go to stupid pop psychology seminars which passed for “management”.
Business people, when threatened, will brag about million dollar homes they don’t own, the Mercedes they leased. A waikiki condo?? Waikiki is for people with no class who want to show off money, usually gangsters or athletes who have no idea how to hold a fork properly. What you don’t hear the business crowd talk about is how their contribution to the world made it better. They will spout nonsense about how “greed is good” and “free markets”.
So what you are saying is that I am the one percent? Hell no, I am the person that believed, tried, and succeeded. Get a job, walk the earth, do something then read fact sheets.
With an attitude like that toward statistics, it is unlikely you will stay in the 1% for long. You will join the long graveyard of other failed businessmen spouting their cliches about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Statistics, when used properly, is far more powerful than human intuition. The bigger a business gets, the more it will need to depend on sophisticated analyses to survive.
Re: Re:
don’t hate just because dorpus is smarter than you…
The Prime Statement
Unbelievable !!
This discussion has gone so far off-topic that the only line in it that makes sense anymore is the one Jason made :
“we can now thank for knowing that we are all now less intelligent for having read their insights.”
I have been tracking quite a few discussion threads here for a while now though I haven’t actually contributed much. This has got to be one of the most pointless discussions yet. Having said that though, I have to say also that the initial topic of discussion about the PhD. in Poker seemed like a very interesting topic, and I expected some really good back and forth on this issue.
What a waste. 🙁
you’re better off getting a bunch of friends in the same room and on a messanger to make cash and split the profits. i know i can do my own probilities, or use a card thingy.
Hacking
Anyone ever hack a poker website ?
what
the only probability here is as before mentioned. DO BOTS KNOW THAT LIQUOR IS IN THE FRONT, AND POKER IS IN THE REAR!… other than that, you are all just a bunch of over educated a holes trying to impress each other and a bunch of people who do not give a $hi* one way or another here what you have to say. you may feel super important about what you have to say, but you are so far off of the point that you are equivalent to drunk sluts showint their tits at a spelling bee trying to win a wet t-shirt contest. get a clue. Getting a PHD at creating a bot… Fuck what you know… get your phd if you are so smart.. but as an honors lit student. part of my grade is evaluating the ability of a first year student to express a point without straying from the original subject. you all fail…. go into business. start up your own business. fail! see who can still afford high speed internet. but quit using this forum to measure the size of your ego cocks. leave somthing that can truly be measured. (other than the length of you tyrades). shut the f up. say something and move on. bitC*32. FU.
Semi-random comment inspired by the comments..
(yes, even further away from the poker-bot topic, though not as far as one may think)
Have you ever read “The Hacker Ethic” by Pekka Himanen?
If not, I think it would interest you.
I went to a small liberal arts college for undergrad in the bluffs of Minnesota. Being from Chicago, I knew how to shoot dice, and quickly taught my dorm mates.
That was how I paid for grad school.
It could have been worse, I might have been a business major.
A) Most people who get Ph.D.s don’t do so for money or career opportunities (although college professors by and large are expected to have them); they do so because they’re very passionate about understanding something that’s nontrivial to comprehend.
B) Just because someone knows about something you don’t (or can’t) understand is a pretty lame reason to denigrate higher education. In fact, Ph.D.s gave us things that you might agree are pretty nifty, such as Google, plastic, space flight, and many vaccines.
So the hell what?
It’s all gonna be academic when they come and arrest your asses for gambling and you’re doing two to ten in leavenworth…
but in consolation, i would think that PhD’s would get the better prison jobs and not have to slow dance with Bruno near as often.
The first step to recovery is admitting there is a problem. Problem is they keep changing the rules.
NoMorePoints.com
some personal insight
I’m currently working for a high end printer design and manufacturing company (won’t use the name because I don’t want to cause problems) and I just thought I would put my two cents in on the PHD topic. The fact of the matter is, I overheard a highering manager the other day turning down 4 PHD candidates for a position as design engineers. Just as a bit more info, I don’t have a degree in any way shape or form and I’m only 23 and yet it seems like my credentials were better suited for the jobs than those with much more education than I. I just have a passion for learning even if its not from school. Therefore school education means nothing without the drive behind it to actually apply it in a useful way.
Now back to the topic at hand. The question of legality for the research shouldn’t even be a question. Take nuclear research for example. The manufacturing of nuclear devices that aren’t sanctioned by a government is illegal, yet the research that goes into it is legal as long as it stays away from the distructive propertys. Therefore using that example I can conclude that as long as the research for these bots isn’t going towards anything that directly breaks what ever law, the legality shouldn’t be questioned.
Now as far as online poker is concerened when there is an exchange of monitary funds, I really can’t say because I haven’t read up on interent gambling laws, but I would assume that it would fall into what ever district or state you were located in when you are gambling as was said earlier on.
Unfortuantly the only catch to this that I can see is that to truly test a bot one would have to put it up against a large number of variations and forms of play and the only way that I can see of doing this is to have it play online against multiple people in multiple seasions, and that’s where you run into legal problems.
Finally on the topic of PHD’s in creating these bots, to be frank I think its a great idea, this coming from a programmer. The thought process that goes into creating any bot especially one that deals directly with other people is something that most people can’t even fathom. I’ve seen a few examples on the subject and may I just say “HOLY CRAP!!” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Any bot created for the study of other people’s reactions to certian events and then to counter with its own reaction, can be tweaked for many differnet uses, so if this is a good way to get started I’m all for it.
That’s just my uneducated two cents on the matter.
(sorry for any bad spelling, can’t spell to save my life)
Re: mstygeba efia
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if the powers that be don’t like online gambling… well they should *fund* research like this, make the bots good enough and punters will melt away faster than the chances of winning ones the word gets out.
until then a few bright sparks will make a fortune, as a reward for comming up with models for scamming the sites.
a few others will be paid ok for fighting the other side of the line.
buyer beware?
So many posts, so little information about the original article.
In most states, playing poker is not against the law. The key to the law is “does the house make money”.
Host a poker game in your basement, provide beer, food, whatever, and you generally are not breaking any laws, no matter how high the stakes can get. Take any cut of the pot or charge admission, no matter how small, even if its to cover expenses, and the rules change.
If the house takes money, then it generally needs to be approved by the state.
Training computers to play poker is a pretty interesting topic, and would be effective against the lesser players, but would probably not do too well against a seasoned player that would shift strategies, go against their normal play, etc. That being said, poker is mostly about the cards, so a computerized program would only improve its odds by a few percentage points. Course, Vegas gladly accepts 2 to 3 percent advantage, so anything that works.