It teaches you how to think about a given poker situation and that enables you to make more effective decisions in the heat of battle. Billings now also serves as a consultant to a team of researchers at Alberta intent on developing a program that can play poker at the level of the best human players. But it isn't ready yet to win a world championship. The first public demonstration of Loki is scheduled to take place later this month at the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Madison, Wisc. G ames have long been an important focus of research in computer science and artificial intelligence.
Poker is an example of a game of incomplete information in which chance plays a role.
Poker provides an excellent domain for investigating problems of decision making under uncertain conditions. Early efforts to model poker, some dating back to the 1950s, were generally unrealistic and rather limited, Billings says. Loki is also better at observing each opponent's actions over time and then adjusting its play accordingly. H undreds of books have been written about how to play poker. Billings contends that the vast majority give flawed advice on strategy.