Man Versus Machine For Poker Title AUC????

Friday, 20 July 2007

In a match reminiscent of 1997’s battle between IBM’s Deep Blue chess program and world chess champion Garry Kasparov, this weekend will see the inaugural $50,000 Man-Machine Poker Championship in western Canada.

In a match reminiscent of 1997’s battle between IBM’s Deep Blue chess program and world chess champion Garry Kasparov, this weekend will see the inaugural $50,000 Man-Machine Poker Championship in western Canada.
The Man-Machine Poker Championship will see a poker-playing computer program developed at the University of Alberta compete against two top-level poker professionals in a controlled scientific experiment with real money on the line. The event will take place in Vancouver during the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) on July 23 and 24 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
The computer program, Polaris, is the reigning world champion computer poker program and will challenge Phil ‘The Unabomber’ Laak and Ali Eslami over four 500-hand duplicate matches. In each duplicate match, the same series of cards will be dealt in two parallel man-versus-machine matches with team mates playing the opposite hands in each game. At the end of the match, the total number of chips won or lost by each team will be added together to determine the winning team.
'This is a world first, and, I hope, the beginning of something that will grow and become an annual event,' said Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer, Chair of the University of Alberta’s Department of Computing Science and a team leader of the Polaris program.
'We are thrilled to be part of this exciting event and in doing so help raise the awareness of artificial intelligence in poker,' added Kurt Lange, President of Poker Academy Software.
'Supplying the software platform is just one of the many ways we are continuing the positive momentum of our longstanding relationship with the University of Alberta. What's more, the competitors and fans can rest assured knowing the match will take place in a controlled and reliable environment.'



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