【科技】Computer poker计算机扑克牌

Computer poker

计算机扑克牌游戏

The perfect card sharp

牛逼的扑克牌游戏行家

A machine has discovered the best possible strategy for one version of poker

一台机器人已经发现了某版本扑克牌游戏可能的最优策略

Jan 10th 2015 | From the print edition

Computer says “fold”

NOUGHTS and crosses (known as tic-tac-toe in America) is one of the first games children learn. The moreinquisitive（ wanting to discover as much as you can about things, sometimes in a way that annoys people） among them soon realise there are strategies that always win if your opponent makes a mistake, and guarantee a drawa（ a situation in which each team in a game has equal points and neither side wins） even if he does not. (The best is to start out in one of the grid’s corners.) When aprovably ideal strategy such as this is discovered for any given game,mathematicians （someone who studies, teaches, or is an expert in mathematics）describe that game as being “solved”.

圆圈打叉游戏（在美国被称为“tic-tac-toe）是孩子们最早学会的游戏之一。越是爱钻研的孩子越是会很快发现有些策略总是会赢当你的对手犯了一个错误，并且保证你立于不败之地即使对方没有犯错。（最好从网格之一出发）当对于一个特定游戏的可证明地理想策略例如这一个被发现，数学家们称这个游戏被”完成“。

Using computers, quite a few games have now been solved in this formal mathematical sense. These include Connect Four, nine-men’s morris and draughts. One thing those examples have in common is that they are “perfect information” games, meaning each player knows, at all times, everything that is going on. Not all perfect information games have been so solved. Chess has not. Neither has Go. But no non-trivial “imperfect information” game, such as one involving playing cards, has ever been solved formally.

目前，只有极少数的游戏被应用计算机解决在这种纯粹的数学意义上。这包括四子棋，九子棋和国际跳棋。这些例子中的一个共同点是他们都是”完全信息“游戏，这意味着每一个玩家在任何时候知道每一步的进展。并不是所有的完全信息游戏都已被解决。象棋没有，也没有这方面的尝试。但是没有不平凡的”完全信息“游戏，例如一个人参与纸牌游戏就曾经被正式地解决了。

Strictly speaking, this remains true. But, as he reports in a paper in this week’sScience, Michael Bowling of the University of Alberta has come close enough to solving a version of poker called Heads-Up Limit Hold’Em (HULHE) that a player armed with his strategy can virtually guarantee coming out ahead of any opponent who is not using it. Such a player would not expect to lose, even over a lifetime of games against an error-free opponent.

严格意义上讲，这仍然是正确的。但是，Alberta大学的Michael Bowling在本周的科学杂志上刊登的一片论文指出，他几乎已经解决了一种叫做HULHE的扑克牌游戏。一个使用他所开发策略的玩家几乎可以保证领先其他不使用该策略的玩家。这样的玩家几乎不可能失败，即使面对一个没有失误的对手持续玩一生的时间。

Dr Bowling picked HULHE because, in poker terms, it is about as simple as it gets. Only two can play, and betting is heavily restricted. This means only 1.38x10¹³ (13.8 trillion) different circumstances can arise within it. Still, that is quite a large number, so previous attempts at solving even this form of poker have involved some simplification. But such simplification means losing important details, and the resulting strategies are an imperfect fit to the real game. By speeding up the algorithms, Dr Bowling’s team managed to bring the full game within reach of computational brute force, in the form of 200 computers, each sporting 24 processors, working in parallel for more than two months.

Bowling博士之所以选择了HULHE是因为，在扑克牌的领域，这是一个相对简单的游戏。只有两个玩家和非常严格的押注限制。这意味着在这个游戏中只有1.38x10¹³ (138亿)种不同的情况。这仍然是一个非常大的数字，所以即使是这种形式的扑克牌游戏在前期的尝试性解决中也引入了一些简化。但是这种简化意味着丢掉了重要的细节，而且得出的策略并不能完美的应用于实际的游戏中。通过加速算法，Bowling博士的团队成功的引入了整个的游戏通过所谓的运算暴力，使用200个计算机，每个计算机支持24个处理器，同时运行2个多月。

Admittedly, the result will not be of immediate use to card sharps. Although the researchers have built a webpage that contains a strategy tool based on their results (readers can try playing against the machine atpoker.srv.ualberta.ca), they have deliberately hobbled its response times to avoid giving succour to cheats.

另外，这个结果并不能立即应用到纸牌游戏中，尽管研究者们已经建立了一个网页，在这个网页中包含建立在他们的研究基础之上的策略工具（读者可以尝试与计算机对战在Poker.srv.ualberta.ca网），他们故意减慢了计算机的反应时间以避免抽老千者有作弊的机会。

Mechanising poker is not, though, Dr Bowling’s primary purpose in developing this software. Many problems that do not look like games, from airport security to medical diagnosis, can nevertheless be modelled as such, and he hopes his algorithm can be adapted to analyse those, too. The program has, nevertheless, answered several bar-room debates about HULHE. It has quantified the well-known advantage that the dealer enjoys. It also suggests that “limping”—a betting strategy favoured by some strong players with certain hands, which involves resisting the temptation to raise the bet as their first action—is usually a bad idea.

尽管机械化的扑克牌不是Bowling博士在开发他的软件时最初的目的。很多问题看起来并不像游戏，从机场安检到医学诊断，尽管不能像这样被模式化，他希望他的算法也能够被应用到分析这些问题。这个项目已经回答了一些关于HULHE的争论。该项目量化了一些玩家喜欢的优势策略，并表明“limping”—一种被一些强势玩家垂青的赌博策略，该策略反对在第一次行动时增加赌注—通常是一个不好的想法。

Whether computers will ever be able to solve other forms of poker remains doubtful. Merely removing the betting restrictions on HULHE, for instance, boosts the range of possibilities to 6.38x10¹⁶¹, a figure so mind-bogglingly big that it far exceeds the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. No amount of improvement in computer hardware will ever make such a problem tractable. The only hope is an enormous, and unlikely, conceptual breakthrough in how to attack the question.

计算机是否有能力解决其他形式的扑克牌游戏仍被怀疑。例如，仅仅去掉HULHE押注方面的限制，可能性就被增加到了6.38x10¹⁶¹,一个令人难以置信的巨大数字，远远超过宇宙中能被观察到的亚原子个数。计算机硬件方面再多的改进也不足以解决这个问题，只能寄希望于庞大的，不大可能的关于如何解决问题的概念性突破。

There are, of course, poker-playing programs out there already that play more complicated versions of the game than HULHE. The best are better than most humans. But they, like chess-playing programs, do not actually solve the game in a mathematically rigorous sense. They just process more data that a human brain can cope with, and thus arrive at a better answer than most such brains can manage.

当然，有很多扑克牌游戏版本比HULHE的版本更复杂。最好的玩家远比大多数人玩的好。但是他们并不是在一种严格的数学意义上解决游戏，例如想起游戏。数学策略仅仅是比人脑处理更多的数据，以此比普通大脑所能处理的得多更好的答案

The most interesting computational solution to poker, though, would be one that did work more like a human brain, for instance by looking for the famous “tells” that experienced players claim give away their opponent’s state of mind, or even bluffing those opponents about its own intentions. When computers can do that, mere humans—and not just poker players—should really start worrying.

更有意思的扑克牌游戏算法应该是更像人的大脑一样工作，例如，通过寻找著名的那些有经验的玩家认为反映对手心理状况的“信号”，甚至阻断那些对手的灵感。当计算机可以做到这些，人类—不仅仅是扑克牌玩家—会真正感到担忧。

From the print edition: Science and technology