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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

"Each night after the play ended, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre added computations to sharpen the AI's strategy."

This sounds more like an "advanced chess" setup, where a human teams up with an AI to play. The title of the article should really be "amateur poker players + AI defeat professional poker players". The real test would be if the AI self-corrected over the length of the tournament, without human intervention.

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"He added that the professionals had been sharing notes and tips in an effort to find weaknesses in the AI's game-play."

This doesn't sound like they had the goal of conducting a fully controlled experiment here, but it's still interesting none the less.

Especially given that the professionals were live streaming and kibitzing with chatters on Twitch during the event.

That's only true if the humans made decisions about what computations to do after each day's play. The computations could have been determined in advance, eg. always run some algorithm to analyze the opponent's play for weaknesses. That's not cheating because the human players get to do the same thing. It's impossible to enforce a "no thinking outside the game room" rule for a multi-day tournament.

I dont think it's "cheating", but it's not just AI that's beating the humans. If operators are allowed to change/tune the AI's algorithm, the human opponent should get to replace himself with another player.

or conversely, operators shouldn't be allowed to tweak the AI logic, but if they program the AI to tweak itself, like review its moves and adjust its algorithm automatically, that would be reasonable, then the AI and nothing but the AI is responsible for the victory.

I don't see why you call it "operator tweaking" even if the computations were determined in advance. You're asking for the poker bot to be scripted to log into the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre on its own and run overnight jobs there. That idea sounds extremely brittle and the challenge of making that script reliable has nothing to do with poker.

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