Ian Ayres, economist and lawyer at Yale, wrote a guest entry for the freakonomics blog at the nytimes about the rise of the machines.

It is not an opportune time to start an online gambling site for checkers… What’s true for checkers is also becoming true for poker.

Sound familiar?

In the very near future, online poker may become a suckers’ game that humans won’t have a chance to win. Bots are quite scale-able and it will be virtually impossible to prohibit computer or computer-assisted online playing.

…computers are much better at confounding the expectations of their human opponents. Computers can play randomized strategies much better than we can. Our brains are so hardwired to see patterns, it’s devilishly hard for most of us to generate random behavior.

Now imagine the not-so-distant future, where computers are much faster and smarter, using a similar but better strategy to beat day traders? Is it that difficult to imagine? They are and they will. It’s only a matter of time. Seriously.
Human day traders: your days are numbered.

He comes to an interesting conclusion:

Bots won’t kill poker. They’ll just drive it off line. Old fashioned “humans-only� competitions will still thrive.

I guess we could always take the stock market off-line, for fun. And his last sentence is one I agree with 100%:

But this is one Darwinian struggle where the unaided human mind is definitely not the fittest.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 12:08 am and is filed under ATS, futures, poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.