Man vs Machine

You know this Polaris deal reminds me a lot about Kasparov vs IBM’s Deep Blue chess program. Kasparov became the youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985. He picked up the official FIDE world title in 1993, he then continued to keep the "Classical" World Chess Championship until his defeat by Vladimir Cramnik in 2000. He later went on to beat out Microsoft’s “deep thought”, which he easily slaughtered the machine. The best they could throw at him at the time. Two years later they fired “Deep Blue” at him, a completely remodeled version of “deep thought” on steroids. The new and improved version was nothing he could have prepared for, the world chess champion took a loss. But the match was a best of 6 series. So he turns it around with a few draws which count as the machine couldn’t beat him. He finishes the thing with a 4-2 victory over the best the digital world has to offer, pretty damn impressive in my book.

Anyway the whole Polaris deal kinda reminds me of that, man vs. machine and all that. According to Michael Bowling a computer could hypothetically play a perfect game, as in develop a way that it would be 100% to lose. Check out his words on it “It’s possible, given enough computer power, for computers to play perfectly, where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money,” THAT’S CRAZY! This is coming from the University of Alberta’s leader of the university’s computer poker research group, so he’s the real deal here.

As terrifying as this all is to me it’s sort of empowering as well to anyone who plays online poker. Lets me know there is a science to playing and there is certainly winning strategies that one can adopt. I was playing just last night at a poker night and was doing ok. But midway through I changed up my style and just started slaughtering. Many times I had absolute crap in the pocket, but managed to pull off some big hands with it. Something to think about anyways.