A.I. Again

On AI - artificial intelligence - we read at Bloomberg's:
Texas Hold’em Mastered by Computer With No Wrong Moves
By Michelle Fay Cortez Jan 8, 2015 6:21 PM ET
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-08/texas-hold-em-mastered-in-months-by-computer-with-no-wrong-moves.html

... A breakthrough in artificial intelligence has allowed a computer to master the simplest two-person version of the poker game, working through every possible variation of play to make the perfect move every time. When performed without mistakes, just like the childhood game tic-tac-toe, there’s no way to lose. In this case the player is Cepheus, an algorithm designed by Canadian researchers.

“We have a strategy that can guarantee a player won’t lose,” said Michael Bowling, a computer scientist from the University of Alberta, who led a team working on the program. “It’s going to be a break-even game. It’s only when someone makes a mistake that they could end up losing.”

You don’t have to take their word, though, their work is published today in the journal Science. The researchers are calling for poker players to test the program for Limit Texas Hold’em by challenging Cepheus online. The results may cause gamblers to rethink some common moves, Bowling said in a telephone interview.

“Not only did we prove some things that most people already believe, like the dealer holds a substantial advantage, we got some answers where the poker community isn’t settled yet,” he said. “For example, re-raising with very low pairs. Most good poker players wouldn’t do that.”

The term for what Bowling and his colleagues did was “solve” the game, creating an optimal way to play that will never lose. It’s the first time that researchers have solved a game played competitively by humans that involves imperfect information, meaning that players don’t know everything, such as their opponents’ cards, as it progresses, said Tuomas Sandholm, from Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department in Pittsburgh, in an editorial that accompanied the article.

The results apply only to the most basic form of the game, known as Heads-up Limit Hold’em, where there are two players and bets and raises are limited. Even with those restrictions, there are more than 10,000 billion decision points in the game...

... Solving the game required even deeper control than when the computer-program Chinook took the world championship title in checkers against humans in the 1990s or when International Business Machines Corp.’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997. While a computer program may one day beat the world’s best players of No-Limit Texas Hold’em, the most popular form of the game, it’s unlikely anyone will ever solve it because there are so many possible moves, Bowling said...

... The researchers devised a computer program that had no poker knowledge, playing in an utterly random fashion, and used artificial intelligence and game theory to calculate the best possible moves. Advances in general algorithms allowed them to work with larger-scale models; essentially the computer played 28.8 trillion hands per second for two months.

“By the time it was done, it had played more poker than all of humanity combined,” Bowling said. “It is so close to perfect right now that we call it essentially solved. You would never be able to know it wasn’t perfect.”

Cepheus’ winning ways aren’t just a matter of knowing the odds, something many professional and amateur poker players already have down. Instead, game theory and reasoning come into play, with the computer making complex decisions about bluffing and betting designed to throw off its competitors. For example, when the computer knows that it has a winning hand, it may not always bet that way -- instead pretending the cards are weaker than they actually are...

I have underlined two small sections. The first says that this is about artificial intelligence, and it is only about game playing.
The second mentions perfection. That which is perfect is not-human. Human is that which ceaselessly strives for perfection, for to have achieved perfection - however that goal could be judged! - is to stop trying. Period. Full stop. It is death-in-life.

Human intelligence is not merely running through billions of outcomes.

Faith is not based on the probabilities of Pascal's Wager, rather is is an intuitive shining within the World.

"Belief Systems" are based on the business of running through all the possibilities and finding them to be true or false. Our understanding of logic is very much based on the "atomistic" logic of Carnap and Wittgenstein and Russell, etc. and very close to machine theory mathematics.

Do not have belief systems. Live, don't believe.

As Sister Maria in The Great Beauty says, "Poverty is not to be talked about.... it is to be lived."
The virtues are not matters of discussion; they are to be lived.
God is not a book, a study, a belief system  alone... God is Life.

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