Poker contestants to create artificial 'bots'

Artificial intelligence poker bots, created by undergraduate students from universities across Indiana, will battle for the top spot in IU’s first Poker Programming Contest.

The competition began May 22 and will accept entries until Aug. 14, said sophomore Eric Jiang, who planned the event.

Contestants can find information, announcements and rules at
http://indianapokerbot.com.

“We have every contestant write an artificial intelligence for playing poker,” he said. “Once they write it, all these poker bots will play in a tournament. That’s pretty much the big picture of how it works.”

Students from all over the state have shown interest in the contest, Jiang said, including undergraduates from IU, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Purdue University.

The idea is not totally new, Jiang said. There has been research and writing on the subject, and the University of Alberta has featured a similar competition for the past few years.

“They have graduate students doing research on it,” Jiang said. “I wanted to keep the playing field even — undergraduate students only, to keep it accessible for other people.”

Faculty advisor Gregory Rawlins, associate professor of computer science at IU, said the advantage of the tournament is that students are not required to come up with the best possible bot player, but to produce one that can be comparative to others in the same time frame.

It is unlikely that participants have previously made a poker bot to enter in the competition,

Jiang said, but they will be able to continue work on the design and enter it in later contests.

“DARPA, a research arm of the military, sponsors a project for a million bucks for a car that will drive itself across some distance out in the desert,” Rawlins said. “The first year was a complete fiasco — none of the cars completed the course. The second year, most of the cars completed, but very slowly. The third year, nearly all the cars completed and a couple of them were very fast.

“So a contest just in and of itself can have great consequences. I expect great things from the Indiana community.”

Jiang said he decided to go with poker because it is an accessible game to everyone.

“Not like chess — that’s just a really hard game for computers,” he said. “Even though poker has a lot of strategy, you can just jump in and start playing, use some commonsense rules.”

Jiang said he hopes the contest will encourage computer science students and motivate them to take on projects outside of the classroom.

“It’s really important for them to have their own interests and motivations to work on,” he said. “I hope this can provide something fun, encourage them to think creatively. Maybe win a little fame and fortune, I guess.”

Though the level Jiang is aiming for in the competition is unusual, Rawlins said he thinks the contest will spread knowledge of programming from the graduate level to the undergraduate.

“Programming knowledge has moved down to what kids know just because they have Xboxes,” he said. “The reason I agreed to be the sponsor is to give the tools that can help them make some kind of impact.”