They Won't Be A Threat To Humans Until They Can Smoke Cigars, Chew Terbacky, And Spit

Larry Greenemeier has a nifty story on the World Series of Poker Robots, in which card-playing apps battle for a $100,000 jackpot. It's not all about fun and games and winning the swag; the software tests the limits of artificial intelligence's ability to make decisions when information is incomplete, or even misleading.

That's trickier than chess, which computers mastered when Deep Blue beat human champ Garry Kasparov. Chess is a "perfect information game": Every player knows the position of every piece on the board. Poker is a "misinformation game": You don't know what cards have yet to be dealt or what your opponents are holding, and your opponents are out to trick you.

Because of the mix of information and misinformation, poker proves to be an excellent model for other real-life, more serious problems, says Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-science professor at Canada's University of Alberta and a researcher at the school's Computer Poker Research Group.

[The technology] could extend into areas with great business, political, and even military implications, Schaeffer says. Leaders are frequently challenged to make decisions based on incomplete information. "The highest-stakes game of poker that I ever followed started with the first Gulf War," Schaeffer says. "Saddam Hussein anted by invading Kuwait." President George H.W. Bush raised by moving in troops. Hussein would later counter by introducing the possibility of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, and it was up to Bush and subsequent presidents to decide whether he was bluffing. "That's the real world," says Schaeffer, who doesn't play poker.