More on Polaris and the “First Man-Machine Poker Championship”
Polaris, run on an Apple MacBook Pro, is the computer program that played Phil “the Unabomber” Laak in the recent tournament. Polaris has two parts, “the first being a stored memory bank of optimal strategy for poker situations, the second, a routine to study its opponent, understand their style of play, and adjust its own to take advantage.” The second part is the interesting part - a challenge to the intuition of humanity. This is the part that Deep Blue didn’t have and the part that traders should be worried about.
“I literally felt the same feeling that you would have if you beat 500 people in a tournament and won a million dollars,” Laak said after the game, which ended to the sound of whoops and cheers from the watching crowd of hundreds as the humans vanquished the computer. “We won, not by a significant amount, and the bots are closing in.”
Interestingly, though, I think the second “intuitive” part of the program cost Polaris the match:
After 48 hours of play, Polaris tied the first round, won the second and lost the last two. The two losses came after the program switched modes: it played strictly by the odds of hands in the first two rounds, but the last two were played with alternating “personalities” of passive and daring that were switched out between hands.
