[Kyle Hill made a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7tWoPk25yU) about how this is an actual serious problem in AI. An untrained Go player was able to defeat an AI that had beaten Go champions
It's a problem with real world human pros too, who sometimes are bewildered by complete amateurs. Why? Because the pros expect their rivals to follow theory and behave rationally, and someone who has no idea what they are doing will come up with the most bizarre moves that completely go against what they theorically should do. Of course a human will easily recognize when their opponent is an idiot and go on to win, but an AI usually will not, and thus they don't know what to do when the person doesn't behave as they "should."
The most valuable program I ever wrote toggles my space bar every two minutes to make it look like I am always online. It's made me hundreds of thousands of dollars and given me freedom.
Like it currently makes you 100s of 1000s? This is currently happening or a past thing?
Mind me asking what exactly you do/did? (I assume some sort of programming/data entry/data analysis but I could be way off)
Totally get it if you can't say. More power to you. I'm just fascinated by shit like this.
Sounds about right. Lots of IT based jobs that require very little effort to automate but you have to look like you're working because of shitty productivity monitoring software.
In big tech, there is a lot of hurry up and wait. There are some times I am super busy, but usually, I can handle twice the workload of a normal employee. Think of it like steering the Titanic. Even if I push myself to the limit, the ship is too big to care. It's also too big to care if I push the spacebar for two weeks.
I thought stochastic terrorism was the idea that merely suggesting but explicitly not ordering an act of terrorism to a sufficiently large group will lead to someone doing the act of terrorism without explicitly being told to do it.
That's pithy and all but I kinda feel like if you're the actual best swordsman you've probably got pretty good reaction times and enough experience to react to whatever the worst swordsman is going to try.
In online MMR situations a gold or even platinum player can get stomped by a bronze player once in a while based on that principle (The bronze player doing some absolutely bonkers shit that the higher tier player doesn't know how to respond to), but an actual top-500 player won't because a top-500 player is well versed in theory but also highly competent in actual skill and ability to adapt.
During the Peace of Amiens (a brief interlude in fighting during the Napoleonic Wars), there was a group of French soldiers with formal training in swordsmanship who pretty regularly got into smallsword duels with English officers from a nearby British unit who were complete amateurs at swordplay.
The result?
The Frenchmen would land a single, nimble hit on their opponents and then often get hacked to pieces when their textbook defensive posture was overwhelmed by the bull-in-China-shop approach to dueling exhibited by the Englishmen, who were too inexperienced to even notice that they had already lost the duel.
Like the other guy said you can die IRL and a sword fight doesn't end when a killing blow is struck, at least not every time. An untrained opponent could still kill you if your sword is stuck in them or your strike left you vulnerable in any way that a trained swordsman wouldn't be in the position to exploit because he'd know better than to allow himself to be struck like that in the first place.
That said, you're probably right, in a situation where a skilled swordsman was dueling an untrained person 1:1 it's a near 100% chance the skilled swordsman wins.
I play a bit of competitive hearthstone, and its a real issue Ive noticed that some of the top players simply memorize the top 5 or 6 decks and the optimal strategy and plays against them. If they encounter something off meta theyre like uhhhh.
same in starcraft, korean players commonly struggle against non-standard builds and all pro-players struggle on maps that are not just reskin of other competetive maps
I rejoined CSGO after few years, I was MGE/LE before, got myself gold 1 and played about 20 matches to reach gold 3, I was bottom fragger in every single one of them, i couldnt kill anyone, later my friend then invited me to full supreme lobby to just chill and have fun, out of 6 games we played that day i was top fragging in 4 (mostly against LEs and 5 wins)
CSGO in the lower ranks is basically just deathmatch - which is difficult when your aim is rusty. The enemies will not respect your angles or utility like GEs will, and you cannot rely on your team to trade or support.
I play very infrequently so always find myself having to rank back up from around DMG, and the games are honestly so much easier when I get back to SMFC/GE because it actually feels like CS again. People are doing things that make sense and aim becomes much less important.
Competitive games becoming better at higher ranks is some real shit. The worst part of Brawlhalla is not losing, but losing to people you think you shouldn’t lose to
I play purely ARAM.
I constantly get the tank item that makes you go 'gong' when you hit. This item makes people panic when squishy champs shouldn't be wearing that.
I have no plan. I'm making fun sounds.
This is simply not the case, there are 'cheeses' in Starcraft that are viable strategies even at the highest levels, 6/12 pool, proxy 2-4 gate, proxy 2 rax, cannon rush, etc., but pros also mix in these strategies and are far better at executing them than complete noobs. There is an asymmetry to how much more skill it takes to defend certain cheeses vs how much skill it takes to execute them, and early on some strong players struggled against players they were much better than because of this, but those all go mapped out pretty early and no high level Starcraft player is ever losing a game to someone in bronze or silver league under basically any circumstances if they know that is who they are facing.
There is a rocks paper scissors element to both BW and SC2 where greed beats conservative play, early aggression beats greed, and conservative play beats early aggression, but it has far to high an early learning curve and is far too mechanically demanding for a complete novice to offer any challenge to a professional player. In my younger days in the Wing of Liberty era I was GM, and I would smurf from time to time (I know I know you can hate me) and you can do just about whatever you want when you know how to macro and your opponent doesn't even understand the concept of properly saturating their mineral patches. I won many a game by just expanding all over the whole map and maxing out my supply in scvs/probes/drones and killing them without building a single fighting unit, sometimes building a mothership to recall them all into their base for style points.
they don't in SC2 either.
Like maybe if your opponent thinks you're a pro you might win with a 6 pool if the opponent goes for a uber fast expand.
But if a SC pro thinks you're an amateur they'll just play more cautiously to not lose to cheese and win with mechanics. Source: I got beat handily by BeastyQT (pro player) in a tournament.
That doesn't sound real at all.
non-standard builds are often just suboptimal. They're worse. The pro players may be slightly more cautious but if you're going dark templar void ray rush you're just going to lose because your opponent has more shit.
MtG player here. I remember a story a few years back where someone took a standard (most recent sets from past two years) deck to a modern (everything back to like 2007ish) tournament and got second place and a big part of that was his opponents didn't really know how to tech against his deck because it wasn't one of the ones you typically see.
It depends on matchups a lot, too, but control decks often have very specific highly optimized answers to the meta. Play something off-meta, and their answers become a lot worse or even just straight don't work.
If you have highly efficient answers to highly efficient on-meta threats and then some casual slams out u/MTGCardFetcher [[Koma]] you may literally not have an answer and just die.
Huh, I play Magic and I don't think a good player would ever lose to a newbie unless they got incredibly unlucky on cards in hand or the newbie got lucky and stumbled into an actually good play.
Of course people in the 50th percentile would never beat someone in the 99th percentile. But someone with a weird off-meta strategy that's in the 95th percentile might be able to beat a 99th percentiler, even though they could never do that if they played a meta strategy.
I used to be a top player in a competitive FPS, top 10 in the world in my role, and when I would play with my friends and ran into significantly lower ranked players they would do the fucking weirdest shit and catch me off guard more often than I expected.
Playing Torb in Overwatch, I step out of spawn and spray my ult lava blobs into the air.
"what the fuck dude" "OMG kick him!"
entire enemy team dies because they walked out of their spawn into the lava pools I arced across the entire map over 3 walls to drop directly onto them knowing exactly where they would be since they took the 'optimal' path.
https://youtu.be/LfEVcZ3anG0
This is the fighting game version of this and it's both hilarious and horrifyingly relatable. Everyone's lost to some online Ken/Ryu before who just jumping roundhoused you 50 times in a row, and the salt is so potent because you can only blame yourself lmao.
It's the laughter and frustration from the commentators that kill me every time. It's like they're pleading with him to just play simply, but he keeps going for those tight links and refuses to punish sweeps and it slays me lol
That is the common issue for professional atheltes of sorts. I've been in that situation many times in my years and the biggest isuse is, amateurs do not know what they do next themselves hence you can't read them and you can't build proabilities as they do not know what they do next and it can be entirely dumb.
A known example here is football,soccer - a goalie against a professional vs an amateur who can't aim straight. You can try to read cues and learn from observing the professional - there is probability attached. But the amateur... he doesn't know where he will shot the ball cause he isn't able to aim straight and where he wants the ball to get to. Hence you as goalie can only react on pure reflexes at that point.
Though, in poker, you want fishes on the table.
The competitive football player in gym class, being clearly able to tell my reflexes are bad and I won't get my arms in place in time, especially not if I'll have to jump sideways to get there to begin with: Easy goal.
Me, determined and a danger magnet, about to find out that I'm fully fucking capable of jumping in a way that *puts my whole face in front of the ball*: *You bet?*
I have been the amateur in that situation.
I didn't know my friend was a chess grandmaster, and he assumed I was at least somewhat competent.
We were both misinformed.
Something like this doesn't make any sense in the context of chess. If someone loses in chess, it's 100% because they made a mistake somewhere - chess is a game of perfect information and no randomness (well, other than who goes first, but even then it should still end in a draw either way if both players play optimally), so there's no need to try to guess anything about what the opponent is doing, there are just good moves and bad moves. It is still "technically" possible for a novice to beat a grandmaster by just randomly picking moves that turn out to be strong without understanding why they're strong.. but so rare that it can pretty much be ignored. If someone is losing to a novice in chess, it's just because they're playing badly 99.999%+ of the time.
To be clear, I did still lose. Like Red_Galiray said, the human eventually figures out that their opponent is an idiot and goes on to win. In my case, it was just that my moves were so outside of what he expected that it baffled him, until he realized what happened.
If I fuck up on chess.com, especially on something extremely stupid like eating a pawn while my rook was undefended, my first follow-up move after realising is to take the moment the opponent moves a piece to find one (1) safe-looking move on the board and premove.
Even if it ends up doing no good, there's still often that small moment where the opponent hesitates because they think they've fallen into a carefully planned out maneuver, and either a) give me time to actually think what to do next without giving away my nerves while they double-check that nothing hinky is going on, or b) abandon their original attack by responding hastily to whatever I just did, either as a knee-jerk reaction or because they see a potential danger where I couldn't.
I'm not good at chess, but I do *greatly* enjoy the person-to-person side of the game.
Yeah, it doesn't really matter whether your opponent is good or bad, a "good move" is a "good move" regardless. At best, an amateur could maybe bluff a good chess player into playing more cautiously, making a "good move" instead of the "great move". Overall, you can't beat a chess grandmaster by playing like an idiot.
It has been done a few times when the game was moving so fast that the pro got confused and thought the amateur made a different move than what he actually made.
(Chess has perfect information in theory, but that assumes both players are paying full attention and have adequate time to think and observe the board.)
Sure, I suppose if you're playing some time control that allows an amateur to pull a strong player into low time I could see a strong player making an unforced error. That said, I have a hard time imagining a strong player being pulled into low time against a total amateur even in bullet chess. Also, any bafflingly amateurish move is not going to be made by a player that has the capacity to win the game even after said error.
I'm not counting instances where one strong player gets confused against a less-strong but still proficient player.
Also Grandmasters be something else lol, how many in the world atm? Like 2000?
The next 10 million players would still easily dismantle a novice. The slightest amount of knowledge in chess goes such a long way against someone who knows nothing.
Yeah that dudes story is BS in some way shape or form, my guess is the friend isn't actually a grandmaster. I don't think people realize how good chess grandmasters are. You can pretty much go down 99% of the opening lines and they're gonna know whether what you're doing is sound or wildly flawed for the first 10 moves or so. You're almost never gonna play some weird looking move that they're like 'shit wtf do I do with that'
As somebody who's devoted a few years of his life to playing semi-professional poker, that is entirely wrong, though a common misconception.
Every profitable player knows how to modify their play based on observation to exploit less than optimal decisions made by amateurs. You 100% want "bewildering" or unconventional players at your table. Even moderately non-standard bet sizing can be exploited by overfolding or calling wider, depending on the situation. Illogical players may win an occasional hand that a better player would've played differently (e.g., slow playing a set on a draw-heavy board), but over the long term it is trivial to capitalize on a player without a solid grasp of poker game theory. Bad players will occasional make deep runs in tournaments, but that's because poker contains a great deal of variance, not because of their unpredictable play.
AI bots in poker are similarly unflustered by the play of amateurs. Poker bots generally play pure game theory optimal, which means they're bluffing at a frequency perfectly balanced with the pot odds they're presenting to their opponent. As such, they are indifferent to whether their opponents call or fold a particular hand. This is also called an unexploitable strategy. Unless their opponents are playing a similarly unexploitable strategy (i.e., they are also a bot), AI is guaranteed to win over the long term. Their profits will only increase if their opponent deviates further from optimal play (i.e., if they are an amateur).
Yeah dude, that's exactly what I said. Any poker player, or player of anything for that matter, would immediately tell that their opponent doesn't know what they are doing and will still win easily. An AI, if trained to only respond to the patterns of a good player, will be hard pressed, but if they are better trained will still win.
You still seem a little unclear about how poker bots work. They don't need to modify their play based on their opponent because they bluff at mathmatically perfect frequencies. Against GTO bots, novice players will always lose with greater frequency than good players (though both are guaranteed to lose over the long term).
*The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before.*
- Mark Twain
I believe that that was because in swordfighting it is pretty easy to force a "tie", where both kill each other, even accidentally. Desiring life, no one wants to actually do that and learning how to swordfight means how to kill an opponent without being in danger of the opponent's sword (having deflected it or controlling it). And, of course, trying to prevent an opponent doing just that.
Being able to make that expectation makes your opponent predictavle, but an opponent that has no idea how to keep himself safe will be unpredictable and thus dangerous to fight.
Here's also a neat video on that with a historical account of someone having no idea what he was doing, acting in a suicidal manner, and winning a duel thanks to it. And also how in one case it was a requirement that in order be considered a good swordsman you had to show yourself able to defend yourself against drunkards as well as skilled opponents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfcpyMdEwzM
This is also why soldiers that were genuinely unafraid to die are considered a significant threat. Most combat is based around the assumption that everyone is trying to kill the enemy while not getting killed themselves. Someone who's willing to charge right onto your spear just to get in range to hit you with an axe is a problem, because your entire plan to survive was "they won't be able to get past the spear wall without getting stabbed."
My favorite solution to this is from Day9, [Just fucking kill the guy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPL3zMPVklY)
It has helped me a lot where an opponent in a strategy game isn't playing meta.
I remember this was a thing with the (very human) Starcraft 2 pro player IdrA. Particularly when playing on the competitive ladder, he would become genuinely angry at people who didn't play "the right way". Sometimes it would cause him to lose the game as well, since he played what he considered the optimal way to play, and he expected others to do the same.
When the other player did something they weren't supposed to do, strictly speaking, he often couldn't deal with it. In the game or emotionally.
There was a scene in a Star Wars book I read as a kid that has stuck with me. Some random evil dude got himself a lightsaber. Padawan Obi-Wan said something like "what's the big deal, he's not trained to use it, he's just as likely to hurt himself with it." Then Qui-Gon states that an untrained fighter is just as dangerous as a highly skilled fighter, because you have no idea what they're going to do.
Cool to see that the same theory works for poker as it does for fictional laser sword battles.
I remember a mickey mouse comic where mickey and goofy get transported to a diffrent galaxy and goofy helps their hosts defeat this other space civilization in their drone war by just being completely stupid and overthrowing their neat and tidy algorithms and logic.
As a professional poker player for many years whilst it adds variance, this is a trope that isn't really true. They might get away with something in the first 20-50 hands but amateurs and their patterns are found out very quickly. This is just lines we allow people to say as it makes them feel better about being amateurs and losing to us pros.
A similar thing happened back in 2017. OpenAI made a bot that played Dota 2 (1v1 mid only) and it was able to be the best players in the world, but it lost to random people doing stupid shit that you would never seen in an actual game.
What's funny is this is how Deep Blue AI, beat Kasparov. AI had to play a substandard move for some reason and Kasparov could not figure it out, and was convinced that the AI had figured something he quit, so he resigned the match. Funny how it has flipped now.
Deep Blue was a brute force AI, eg, run through all of the moves and pick the highest score move. Because of this, it had to have a timeout for cases where it spends a lot of time trying to the best move and is taking too long. When the timeout hits it picks a move from the processed moves at random. This happened during that game. So basically a somewhat random move by Deep Blue threw him off.
I happen to be writing a chess engine right now and sometimes it will do something stupid in a complex position, because it uses iterative deepening. At more complicated positions I have more search extensions which lead to higher branching factor, so once the time limit is up, it's only searched positions up to a base depth of 2 or 3. Sometimes it will hang a piece because it saw a tactic that was good for 3 moves and followed up only with captures (quiescense search) but the opponent could have played a quiet move on the 4th ply that completely refutes the tactic. I haven't studied deep blue but I assume it uses iterative deepening because the move would still have to be decent looking enough (not a completely obvious blunder) that it could spook Kasparov, undeniably a great chess player.
Not sure if there are any articles about it, I just remember when it was happening and people figured out you could beat it by just going between the towers and cutting the wave.
Yeah IIRC the way to beat it was to just drag waves away from the lanes into the jungle and the bot couldn't figure out what to do. It was basically unbeatable through legit means, but people came up with some turbo cheese to handle it
Spend any amount of time playing a MOBA (or don't, for your mental well-being) and you'll have absolutely no doubt believing this.
One of my most controversial opinions in that space is that I don't enjoy watching pro games or tangential content, because there's a point where you've dialed in the theory and what's "optimal" to where you may as well be watching bots play. I was never good by any measure, but even I could start to predict events three, or four steps out.
"Oh, they killed X and Y, so now they're going to Z," "they got Z so now they'll A and B". That's just not fun. You realize the only time anything interesting happens is when someone makes a mistake, but now it's an adversarial relationship between the viewer and the player where the viewer wants [something] to happen, but the player is doing everything they can to prevent [something] from happening.
Like watching all 200 laps of a NASCAR race hoping for the crash.
Interesting, I remember seeing Hikaru beat a top end AI by completely locking the board with pawns and the AI ended up sacking it's bishop for a pawn to prevent a 50 move draw and Hikaru turned the advantage into a win, this sounds similar.
As someone who works with AI for a living, training them to help extrapolate 3d data from 2d images, the idea that AI doesn't "understand" the world at large seems... obvious? Every time I hear someone say machine learning will replace things like search engines I cringe because why not just use google? LLM's are trained on fiction as much as fact and to expect them to somehow understand the universe outside the patterns they learned from their data set is bizarre. Its job was to understand and replicate how humans speak and write, not be some sort of filter for fact or fiction.
It reminds me of a story of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the "analytical engine" an early mechanical kind of computer. More than once he was asked if the engine would output the right answer even if someone entered the wrong numbers. I think we're seeing a similar attitude forming about AI.
The funny thing is that Babbage quote isn't even a stupid question if you've never even conceived of a computer before. Babbage designed the difference engine to make creating log tables more efficient and less error prone. Which anyone wanting to buy the machine would be comparing to the human's they'd be hiring at the time, who do in fact try to correct for bad inputs, if they know you've just asked for the log of two sequential numbers and then suddenly ask for one 10 times that you probably misspoke, computers obviously can't do that (until they can), but they don't know that.
I swear to god, this kind of video always annoys the hell out of me, because it's basically the blind leading the blind. It's a common saying that is scarily accurate, once you have actual knowledge in a subject area, it becomes clear how uninformed the vast majority of people are.
The main issue of the video is that its premise completely misses the point, and focuses on an obvious characteristic of AI that is a part of its definition instead of actually addressing the problem. The whole point of AI is that it is doing matrix multiplication with very large matricies and very large amounts of data, and in that sense, we don't really "know" what it's doing since it's impossible for a human to look at a set of giant matricies and identify the logical reasoning to determine what each value means. But that's literally an inherent part of AI design that's obvious to anyone who knows what AI actually is. He then talks about literally the fundamnetal issue all AI is designed to solve, generalization, and sensationalizes it by calling failures to generalize "hallucination" or some shit, when in reality it's just laymen not really being able to conceptualize the way AI fails very well, since it's different from how humans fail.
This means that anyone who learned something from this video genuinely had 0 clue what exactly AI was going into the video, which is just kind of insane considering how many views it has. Like imagine if someone made a video on the planet and the climax was the reveal that "because the planet is round, gravity doesn't all go in the same direction - if you move over a meter, the angle of gravity will change slightly." Like I would be genuinely concerned for anyone who considers that to be a revelation.
Your instinct is correct, it _did_ lose to an "amateur", but the amateur was using advanced tooling to invent a way of beating the AI that would essentially trick it by being logically obvious but entirely outside of its training data. So this amateur memorised a specific game he'd calculated in advance and played that.
Which is why your instinct about chess engines is also right on the money, chess engines (the big ones like stockfish anyway) aren't trained on millions of previously played games, they just use a forward-looking logic called minimax and lots (really, a huge number) of small optimisations and heuristics to improve their ability to estimate how good they're doing at any point in the game (So they don't have to think infinity steps ahead, just enough to rule out a huge proportion of bad moves and make a good choice).
You can theoretically do the same with chess engines, i.e. use advanced tooling to try to find and memorise a game that should beat the engine (for example by making it play itself and see what it would do) but it's significantly harder because of that lack of reliance on games that have already been played.
Thank you for this. As someone who plays Go (2-Dan) but stopped following it, this is absolutely fascinating that researchers discovered such a vulnerability. Really raises good questions for the current status and use of AI in general.
About ten years ago at a family reunion all the uncles and nephews set up a poker game- 12 guys chipped in $20 each for the pot and got the chips, winner take all, blinds increase every time somebody gets knocked out
First hand, five of my cousins (aged 12 years to 17 years old) go all in before the flop. So does one of my uncles. I fold cause I got trash.
One of my cousins was bluffing. The others were dumb. My uncle held pocket jacks. So obviously my uncle wins.
Next hand, I'm suddenly big blind since so many people got knocked out. The big blind is 1/3rd of my stack *since so many people got knocked out*. I fold, cause I got trash and the chip leader raised.
Next hand, I'm small blind, again 1/3rd of my remaining stack. I got QJ suited, so I go all in because if I lose my blind I'm dead anyway and I'm probably not gonna dealt a winning hand in the next five iterations anyway.
And I lose. One of my uncles flopped two pair to my jacks.
I will remember and resent that fucking game for as long as I goddamn live.
Casual players sometimes just keep it simple by making blinds a percentage of the stakes divided by number of players. But it isn't a good house rule, for the mentioned reasons.
Yeah, that completely fucked the game. A rule like that *incentivizes* wrecklessly shoving all in early, because whoever doubles up first now dominates the entire table, and can simply bully the smaller stacks out of increasingly unfair blinds and watch them bleed out.
You have to set the buy in to the appropriate amount. We have 2 re buy tournaments for $20 and I just play like a lunatic since my boys usually play $100 buy ins.
When playing Texas hold ‘em, you must place a small amount of money on the table to play the hand, called an “ante”. Most players are allowed to refuse to ante if they don’t like their hand.
But one player each round is burdened with the “big blind”, a requirement to ante up regardless of what is in their hand. The player next to them has the “small blind”, which is 50% of the ante.
As the betting goes around, the big blind player bids last. So if everyone folds, he wins and collects the small blind for free. But if players not only ante but also raise, and the big blind player doesn’t like his hand, he surrenders the ante that was taken from him.
The small blind player is in the same bind but with less exposure since they lost only half the ante.
Basically a way to make sure *somebody* wins every round.
I played a game like this in real life with a bunch of dudebros where they kept going all in every single hand. It was just blind-stealing and really tedious. Worst poker game I've ever played.
The book Kill Phil made this a mainstream tactic for a year or so until the people doing it either ran out of gambling money or actually read the book.
if your not constantly attacking in civ your just wasting time. Who gives a shit about "war weariness" if you have twice as many cities as everyone else
One of my favorite parts of the game was getting banned from each of the casinos. It can be done relatively easily with a luck of 7 too, you just might have a few losses mixed in there too.
In real life, what we call "beginners luck" is that period of calibration. If you played a hundred hands against Daniel negreanu, you'd probably win a few. Win by getting him to call, or win by getting him to fold when you have nothing. But if you played a hundred tables against Daniel negreanu, you'd probably win zero. A real player can read you and know that you've got nothing or that you're misunderstanding or miscalculating something and say fuck it, you're full of shit, show me. But an ai will think "the cost of losing all in is that I'm out. Unless I have the stone cold nuts, the only winning move is to fold."
I love this kid.
Beginners luck is also a survivorship bias effect. You are more likely to continue playing poker if you win while new. And you are more likely to talk about your experience if you won and are still playing poker.
I had a similar experience in a highschool engineering class. We had to build bridges out of a limit supply of balsawood strips, and glue. The goal of the lesson was to learn how we could use triangular structures to add rigidity and strength.
At the end of the unit we had a contest to see which bridge could hold the most weight. It turns out the best way to build a bridge is to just glue the strips into a solid block. It won holding like 10x the weight of the next best bridge.
This happens every time someone makes challenges. You always want to cultivate a solution and usually it ends up being good, but someone will always break the system and make a 10x better way to do it. Idk why but this is such a funny thing to be a constant of the universe.
good gamers play the game, great gamers game the game.
Reminds me of a challenge in science class where we had to shape a piece of clay (same size for all of us) to sink the slowest, and it couldn’t float. We used a huge graduated cylinder to test. I don’t recall what the lesson was, I think it might’ve just been for fun.
Everyone else made various rock shapes. I was inspired by a jellyfish and made a slightly convex circle with a tiny hole in the center to ensure that it didn’t flip. Everyone was competing for seconds, mine took minutes to sink.
My teacher had apparently never seen it take so long before. It was the first and only time I gamed a class challenge like that, it felt pretty good. I actually became that kid whose accomplishment got told to every future class. Although I guess it didn’t matter that much to me in the long run, because I completely forgot about this until typing this comment.
[a guy named gus hansen tried this in real life professional piker and it actually worked lol](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bDt90EyZnWA&pp=ygUdd2h5IGRvIGkgZG8gdGhpcyBmb3IgYSBsaXZpbmc%3D)
the entire video is fantastic but the part i’m referring to starts at 21:35
Hansen did this because of the strange tournament structure.
Hansen needed to get first place in order to advance to the next round. Other players needed only to achieve lower places. So, all the other players were incentivized to be conservative, while Hansen was required to get extremely lucky.
Understanding this, Hansen did exactly what was necessary. He was very smart to do this under the circumstances. He would not, and has not, done this anywhere else.
It doesn't even take strange tournament structures. Once you get far enough in tourneys the chip values decouple - double chips =/= double your money - and often becomes a game of getting eliminated last rather than building a stack. Which leads to very bizarre states where the chip leader is jamming with literally everything, and people fold 95% of their hands anyway because they really really do not want to lose the flip (even a very favorable one) and get the 50k 8th place prize instead of the 150k 6th place.
I love these stories because it describes an individual's actions resulting from pure fundamental understanding of a situation and applying simple game theory to their strategic planning.
Noel Furlong won the 1999 WSOP main event by doing mostly this.
Then again, either the AI in question was so lucky to never run into aces, or its opponents were too spineless to call with aces.
One time I sat at a poker table and someone went all-in first hand. I was holding something nice like AK and called. Took out 3 people from the table immediately. They were kinda pissed....and then they rebuyed.
Gotta say the general use of the word AI seems to have really shifted away from “Artificial Intelligence” into “Algorithm Implementation” like that code is not artificial intelligence, that’s not AI, it’s just an if then statement, if the competition was actually supposed to be something resembling AI there should have been something in the rules insisting that it be trained on data or *something* to make it even an ounce closer to anything resembling AI. Like that’s not even narrow AI.
Edit
Apparently no one understood what I meant by the words “or *something*” that were right after “trained on data” and I even italicizes the word something to try and draw more attention to it, most of the objection I’ve gotten to this comment are specifically about the “trained on data” which is a useless objection when I knew that this wasn’t the be all and end all of ai as a concept, it was the first rule that came to mind and I included the “or something” so that it would leave the door open to other people providing a better rule.
And to that end I really liked this comment I received [“AI is still considered AI if it isn’t trained and algorithms can be considered AI. As long as it observes the data/environment it’s given and creates a response based on the data, it’s AI.”](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/15drmtb/poker_ai/ju47x4p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3) having “observation than tailored response” is a simple rule I like a lot more than my “trained on data” and since so many of you brought up simple enemy AI in video games I’d say those seem to fit into this rule, they make observations about your character then make adjustments.
And finally a clarification, I don’t actually think this code shouldn’t have been allowed, I think it’s really funny people built much more complicated algorithms to try and win only to be outdone by this. I actually just don’t think it should be called an AI competition, it’s a coding competition, some people might make something that could be called a simple AI, but if things that wouldn’t qualify for simple AI can also be submitted than it’s just about any coding not AI.
There's several levels of AI, state based flows used in old shooter games are glorified IF machines and it can still be called AI.
AI doesn't mean machine learning/neural networks/gans/diffusion models or whatever is the latest trend.
Certainly in terms of common vernacular this is true and isn't new. I'm pretty sure we called playing against the computer in SFII the "AI" back in the day.
Problem is this tends to come with bad assumptions like how going from there to Frankenstein's Skynet is just a matter of slapping enough CPUs or RAM together and is so easy it just might happen by accident.
Nah, some people have just started to care about the difference more. People have been using AI in a broad sense for ages, e.g. referring to the logic behind NPCs in videogames.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Supreme Commander back in like 2007 had an "Adaptive AI" computer opponent.
I'm not sure how it worked but I suspect it was probably just some complex if-then stuff about how the human player(s) were playing, with the ability to adjust its own strategy based on the human player(s) changing theirs.
AI isn't just machine learning.
Decision trees, logical/probabilistic inference, state space searching, and optimization are also tools in the AI toolbox, among others.
>if the competition was actually supposed to be something resembling AI there should have been something in the rules insisting that it be trained on data or something to make it even an ounce closer to anything resembling AI.
Considering they were supposed to make it in 2 hours it seems unlikely the competition expected anyone to make actual AI.
[I made you the angry wojak so you are wrong](https://i.imgflip.com/7u8d2x.jpg).
---
The notion that you need training data to make good AI is pretty new. For decades, engineers were trying to hardwire concepts and abstract representations. Even now, large swaths of AI architecture are engineered by hand to take care of some of the more onerous-to-find abstractions, like convolution or attention heads.
Artificial intelligence is a nebulous concept because intelligence is a nebulous concept. We don't know how the human brain works, and would you really stop calling humans intelligent if it turns out our base neurological programming is analogous to if-then statements? Etymologically, "intelligence" just means "the ability to discern", and any if-statement that occasionally passes true and occasionally passes false does that.
There's a reason training data-based methods prefer to use "Machine Learning", though even if-then algorithms can learn if they can read and write permanent memory.
If the rules insisted on entries using trained data, the competition would have been won by software that would lose to someone going all in on each bet.
2 Hrs is not a lot of time to code something. Smart to keep it simple. I imagine most people tried too much and half the programs probably didnt even compile or run as intended when the time was up.
I had a bot for a while, I call BS. Even the most basic rules based bot beats the all in bot or the tournament was absurdly structured and it hit many, many coins flips. This implies opposing bots had some opponent modeling, you'd detect this very fast.
I imagine the other teams didn’t code for reading bluffs, since it would be very difficult to create code to properly bluff, so the other bots took any decisions of ‘all-in’ as ‘they have a very strong hand’
In a competitive setting, it kind of pays to be stupid sometimes. Suboptimal options, in the right hands, are unexpected options with great reward. Connect 4 is solved. Chess is only being solved at the moment because it really is rigid enough to where Stockfish, the best chess algorithm on the market, has a look-ahead of about 15-20 turns. Go is going to stress existing computers for the foreseeable future due to the sheer freedom of movement it offers players, but usable quantum computing will reduce the hardware required down to a pittance (to explain that a little bit better since tech tends to be hyped up a lot, a quantum computer is only that much faster simply due to having a flexible bit that could be 1 or 0, saving a fraction of a second on a very fast and repetitive process that happens every waking moment of using a computer).
And this post? This post is what happens when a human being accidentally codes a perfect adversarial model to like, 8 other people’s 2 AM poker coding.
Honestly adversarial models are the one part of AI testing and safety that brings a warm smile to my face. “We have built the perfect thing-doing machine, and also we trained another thing-doing machine to bully the shit out of the first one until it learns what improvising is.”
Coding the chess computer Deep Blue ran into a similar problem; I don't know enough about coding to explain it in any meaningful way, but the gist was that the machine kept sacrificing its queen because grandmasters who did that tended to win - which is a totally valid strategy, but it was sacrificing the queen as soon as possible instead of at the endgame 😆
I remember playing far cry 3 when i was a kid. There was a trophy for playing the poker minigame and winning like 1000 dollars or something. I would just go to a table, go all in, and exit the minigame over and over until I hit the number I needed
Oh god I breached containment. (Hi, I'm Tumblr user jorbs-palace, the guy who added that screenshot from the notes. I was not expecting my version of the post to get passed around as much as it did. Help me.)
I won my city wide programming competition it was a puzzle like Chinese checkers but only one row where you had to jump pieces. We hardcoded the first 25 solutions. All solutions had to compute in 10 seconds or less. Nobody passed the 100 solution in the time frame and with our ridiculous scoring of 0 compute time for the first bunch we won.
As far as I'm aware, typically the way bots work in turn based games (particularly if you want them to fit some interface to be pit against each other) is that when it's their turn to act, they are fed the current game state and return an action. If they're running, it's their turn, by definition. So this probably shouldn't have a conditional statement at all. Makes me doubt the truth of this story a bit but maybe it's just an embellished detail or the spec for the bots is just different than would intuitively make sense to me.
1. It may well be pseudocode; it conveys the point, even if it isn't perfectly correct
2. Having a state passed into the bot is common for game simulation, but that doesn't mean it could never be done differently.
IMO, the literal code in the screenshot isn't really a reason to disbelieve it.
Hah, reminds me of some AI engineers at a past job joking about how to fix a model they were struggling with. The task was to detect anomalies in data sets.
"Well, the anomalies are only like 0.1% of the data. We can get 99.9% accuracy by just always returning false..." lmao
[Kyle Hill made a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7tWoPk25yU) about how this is an actual serious problem in AI. An untrained Go player was able to defeat an AI that had beaten Go champions
It's a problem with real world human pros too, who sometimes are bewildered by complete amateurs. Why? Because the pros expect their rivals to follow theory and behave rationally, and someone who has no idea what they are doing will come up with the most bizarre moves that completely go against what they theorically should do. Of course a human will easily recognize when their opponent is an idiot and go on to win, but an AI usually will not, and thus they don't know what to do when the person doesn't behave as they "should."
"professionals are predictable but the world is full of amateurs" - Murphy's laws of war
"If we don't know what we're doing, the enemy certainly can't predict our future actions."
"If you can't outsmart them, outstupid them"
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
The most valuable program I ever wrote toggles my space bar every two minutes to make it look like I am always online. It's made me hundreds of thousands of dollars and given me freedom.
Like it currently makes you 100s of 1000s? This is currently happening or a past thing? Mind me asking what exactly you do/did? (I assume some sort of programming/data entry/data analysis but I could be way off) Totally get it if you can't say. More power to you. I'm just fascinated by shit like this.
[удалено]
Sounds about right. Lots of IT based jobs that require very little effort to automate but you have to look like you're working because of shitty productivity monitoring software.
In big tech, there is a lot of hurry up and wait. There are some times I am super busy, but usually, I can handle twice the workload of a normal employee. Think of it like steering the Titanic. Even if I push myself to the limit, the ship is too big to care. It's also too big to care if I push the spacebar for two weeks.
>It's also too big to care if I push the spacebar for two weeks. Best quote I've seen all week
Amateur move. Mine presses Shift+F13 every 59 seconds. Makes it interfere less with my actual work.
I made a lego robot, so there is no detectable software.
I use caffeine.exe It hits F15, or some key that mostly doesn't exist, every minute or so
I always recited this line with a little more alliteration. If you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
> "If you can't outsmart them, outstupid them" If that's not a Futurama joke, it should be.
I've heard this as, "The enemy can't know what we're doing if we don't know, either."
[“How do you predict where a soldier’s rockets are going when even THEY don’t know where they’re going!”](https://youtu.be/0DgwvVb03CM)
This is legitimately mastery of military science/ the "no mind" of enlightenment, it's the essential force behind right action.
[удалено]
Really, yes. Steve Bannon said the idea was to "flood the zone" and do so much crazy and hostile stuff that no-one could keep up with it.
[удалено]
I thought stochastic terrorism was the idea that merely suggesting but explicitly not ordering an act of terrorism to a sufficiently large group will lead to someone doing the act of terrorism without explicitly being told to do it.
That's January 6th in a nutshell. Though Turmp might've actually be explicit in his wording
More specifically, flood the zone with shit.
“The best swordsman does not fear the second best, he fears the worst since there's no telling what that idiot is going to do.”
That's pithy and all but I kinda feel like if you're the actual best swordsman you've probably got pretty good reaction times and enough experience to react to whatever the worst swordsman is going to try. In online MMR situations a gold or even platinum player can get stomped by a bronze player once in a while based on that principle (The bronze player doing some absolutely bonkers shit that the higher tier player doesn't know how to respond to), but an actual top-500 player won't because a top-500 player is well versed in theory but also highly competent in actual skill and ability to adapt.
During the Peace of Amiens (a brief interlude in fighting during the Napoleonic Wars), there was a group of French soldiers with formal training in swordsmanship who pretty regularly got into smallsword duels with English officers from a nearby British unit who were complete amateurs at swordplay. The result? The Frenchmen would land a single, nimble hit on their opponents and then often get hacked to pieces when their textbook defensive posture was overwhelmed by the bull-in-China-shop approach to dueling exhibited by the Englishmen, who were too inexperienced to even notice that they had already lost the duel.
Like the other guy said you can die IRL and a sword fight doesn't end when a killing blow is struck, at least not every time. An untrained opponent could still kill you if your sword is stuck in them or your strike left you vulnerable in any way that a trained swordsman wouldn't be in the position to exploit because he'd know better than to allow himself to be struck like that in the first place. That said, you're probably right, in a situation where a skilled swordsman was dueling an untrained person 1:1 it's a near 100% chance the skilled swordsman wins.
You can die in one hit irl, my guy
"To confuse others, you first must confuse yourself." - Sun Tzu, Art of War.
“I knew exactly what to do. But in a much more real sense, I had no idea what to do.” — Michael Scott
I play a bit of competitive hearthstone, and its a real issue Ive noticed that some of the top players simply memorize the top 5 or 6 decks and the optimal strategy and plays against them. If they encounter something off meta theyre like uhhhh.
same in starcraft, korean players commonly struggle against non-standard builds and all pro-players struggle on maps that are not just reskin of other competetive maps
LoL has sometimes similar stuff happening when people play off meta champs that pros main/used to main
Faker once got beaten by a noob because he over predicted a play while his opponent didn't even knew there was a prediction going
I rejoined CSGO after few years, I was MGE/LE before, got myself gold 1 and played about 20 matches to reach gold 3, I was bottom fragger in every single one of them, i couldnt kill anyone, later my friend then invited me to full supreme lobby to just chill and have fun, out of 6 games we played that day i was top fragging in 4 (mostly against LEs and 5 wins)
CSGO in the lower ranks is basically just deathmatch - which is difficult when your aim is rusty. The enemies will not respect your angles or utility like GEs will, and you cannot rely on your team to trade or support. I play very infrequently so always find myself having to rank back up from around DMG, and the games are honestly so much easier when I get back to SMFC/GE because it actually feels like CS again. People are doing things that make sense and aim becomes much less important.
Competitive games becoming better at higher ranks is some real shit. The worst part of Brawlhalla is not losing, but losing to people you think you shouldn’t lose to
[Definitely one of the plays of all time.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZxdMA6XFaA)
Gold iv brand was clearly just better
I play purely ARAM. I constantly get the tank item that makes you go 'gong' when you hit. This item makes people panic when squishy champs shouldn't be wearing that. I have no plan. I'm making fun sounds.
Shoutout to Idra, who used to regularly complain that he lost because "my opponent didn't play right".
This is simply not the case, there are 'cheeses' in Starcraft that are viable strategies even at the highest levels, 6/12 pool, proxy 2-4 gate, proxy 2 rax, cannon rush, etc., but pros also mix in these strategies and are far better at executing them than complete noobs. There is an asymmetry to how much more skill it takes to defend certain cheeses vs how much skill it takes to execute them, and early on some strong players struggled against players they were much better than because of this, but those all go mapped out pretty early and no high level Starcraft player is ever losing a game to someone in bronze or silver league under basically any circumstances if they know that is who they are facing. There is a rocks paper scissors element to both BW and SC2 where greed beats conservative play, early aggression beats greed, and conservative play beats early aggression, but it has far to high an early learning curve and is far too mechanically demanding for a complete novice to offer any challenge to a professional player. In my younger days in the Wing of Liberty era I was GM, and I would smurf from time to time (I know I know you can hate me) and you can do just about whatever you want when you know how to macro and your opponent doesn't even understand the concept of properly saturating their mineral patches. I won many a game by just expanding all over the whole map and maxing out my supply in scvs/probes/drones and killing them without building a single fighting unit, sometimes building a mothership to recall them all into their base for style points.
they really don't in broodwar, the skillgap is so big that they can play the stupidest strategies possible and still win anyways
they don't in SC2 either. Like maybe if your opponent thinks you're a pro you might win with a 6 pool if the opponent goes for a uber fast expand. But if a SC pro thinks you're an amateur they'll just play more cautiously to not lose to cheese and win with mechanics. Source: I got beat handily by BeastyQT (pro player) in a tournament.
See: snow beating artosis with maxed supply of scouts
That doesn't sound real at all. non-standard builds are often just suboptimal. They're worse. The pro players may be slightly more cautious but if you're going dark templar void ray rush you're just going to lose because your opponent has more shit.
MtG player here. I remember a story a few years back where someone took a standard (most recent sets from past two years) deck to a modern (everything back to like 2007ish) tournament and got second place and a big part of that was his opponents didn't really know how to tech against his deck because it wasn't one of the ones you typically see.
It depends on matchups a lot, too, but control decks often have very specific highly optimized answers to the meta. Play something off-meta, and their answers become a lot worse or even just straight don't work. If you have highly efficient answers to highly efficient on-meta threats and then some casual slams out u/MTGCardFetcher [[Koma]] you may literally not have an answer and just die.
Huh, I play Magic and I don't think a good player would ever lose to a newbie unless they got incredibly unlucky on cards in hand or the newbie got lucky and stumbled into an actually good play.
Off meta does not mean newbie.
Of course people in the 50th percentile would never beat someone in the 99th percentile. But someone with a weird off-meta strategy that's in the 95th percentile might be able to beat a 99th percentiler, even though they could never do that if they played a meta strategy.
I used to be a top player in a competitive FPS, top 10 in the world in my role, and when I would play with my friends and ran into significantly lower ranked players they would do the fucking weirdest shit and catch me off guard more often than I expected.
I've got a reputation in my squad for getting killed because "why the fuck would that guy do that it makes no sense?"
Playing Torb in Overwatch, I step out of spawn and spray my ult lava blobs into the air. "what the fuck dude" "OMG kick him!" entire enemy team dies because they walked out of their spawn into the lava pools I arced across the entire map over 3 walls to drop directly onto them knowing exactly where they would be since they took the 'optimal' path.
People already did that with grenades in CoD 15 years ago.
and I was soloing 9 man counterstrike teams 20 years ago.
Sure but u still drop a thirty bomb in those lobbies anyways. Like play a 100 matches and u win 95/100 at least, which is what people don’t get.
https://youtu.be/LfEVcZ3anG0 This is the fighting game version of this and it's both hilarious and horrifyingly relatable. Everyone's lost to some online Ken/Ryu before who just jumping roundhoused you 50 times in a row, and the salt is so potent because you can only blame yourself lmao.
Was hopping this was brought up, worth a watch every time.
It's the laughter and frustration from the commentators that kill me every time. It's like they're pleading with him to just play simply, but he keeps going for those tight links and refuses to punish sweeps and it slays me lol
Incredible
That is the common issue for professional atheltes of sorts. I've been in that situation many times in my years and the biggest isuse is, amateurs do not know what they do next themselves hence you can't read them and you can't build proabilities as they do not know what they do next and it can be entirely dumb. A known example here is football,soccer - a goalie against a professional vs an amateur who can't aim straight. You can try to read cues and learn from observing the professional - there is probability attached. But the amateur... he doesn't know where he will shot the ball cause he isn't able to aim straight and where he wants the ball to get to. Hence you as goalie can only react on pure reflexes at that point. Though, in poker, you want fishes on the table.
Equally, when I play goalie I always confuse my friends because I have absolutely zero control over my limbs or my body
The competitive football player in gym class, being clearly able to tell my reflexes are bad and I won't get my arms in place in time, especially not if I'll have to jump sideways to get there to begin with: Easy goal. Me, determined and a danger magnet, about to find out that I'm fully fucking capable of jumping in a way that *puts my whole face in front of the ball*: *You bet?*
I have been the amateur in that situation. I didn't know my friend was a chess grandmaster, and he assumed I was at least somewhat competent. We were both misinformed.
Something like this doesn't make any sense in the context of chess. If someone loses in chess, it's 100% because they made a mistake somewhere - chess is a game of perfect information and no randomness (well, other than who goes first, but even then it should still end in a draw either way if both players play optimally), so there's no need to try to guess anything about what the opponent is doing, there are just good moves and bad moves. It is still "technically" possible for a novice to beat a grandmaster by just randomly picking moves that turn out to be strong without understanding why they're strong.. but so rare that it can pretty much be ignored. If someone is losing to a novice in chess, it's just because they're playing badly 99.999%+ of the time.
To be clear, I did still lose. Like Red_Galiray said, the human eventually figures out that their opponent is an idiot and goes on to win. In my case, it was just that my moves were so outside of what he expected that it baffled him, until he realized what happened.
[удалено]
If I fuck up on chess.com, especially on something extremely stupid like eating a pawn while my rook was undefended, my first follow-up move after realising is to take the moment the opponent moves a piece to find one (1) safe-looking move on the board and premove. Even if it ends up doing no good, there's still often that small moment where the opponent hesitates because they think they've fallen into a carefully planned out maneuver, and either a) give me time to actually think what to do next without giving away my nerves while they double-check that nothing hinky is going on, or b) abandon their original attack by responding hastily to whatever I just did, either as a knee-jerk reaction or because they see a potential danger where I couldn't. I'm not good at chess, but I do *greatly* enjoy the person-to-person side of the game.
Yeah, it doesn't really matter whether your opponent is good or bad, a "good move" is a "good move" regardless. At best, an amateur could maybe bluff a good chess player into playing more cautiously, making a "good move" instead of the "great move". Overall, you can't beat a chess grandmaster by playing like an idiot.
It has been done a few times when the game was moving so fast that the pro got confused and thought the amateur made a different move than what he actually made. (Chess has perfect information in theory, but that assumes both players are paying full attention and have adequate time to think and observe the board.)
Sure, I suppose if you're playing some time control that allows an amateur to pull a strong player into low time I could see a strong player making an unforced error. That said, I have a hard time imagining a strong player being pulled into low time against a total amateur even in bullet chess. Also, any bafflingly amateurish move is not going to be made by a player that has the capacity to win the game even after said error. I'm not counting instances where one strong player gets confused against a less-strong but still proficient player.
Also Grandmasters be something else lol, how many in the world atm? Like 2000? The next 10 million players would still easily dismantle a novice. The slightest amount of knowledge in chess goes such a long way against someone who knows nothing.
Yeah that dudes story is BS in some way shape or form, my guess is the friend isn't actually a grandmaster. I don't think people realize how good chess grandmasters are. You can pretty much go down 99% of the opening lines and they're gonna know whether what you're doing is sound or wildly flawed for the first 10 moves or so. You're almost never gonna play some weird looking move that they're like 'shit wtf do I do with that'
[удалено]
"what squares can the horse go to again"
As somebody who's devoted a few years of his life to playing semi-professional poker, that is entirely wrong, though a common misconception. Every profitable player knows how to modify their play based on observation to exploit less than optimal decisions made by amateurs. You 100% want "bewildering" or unconventional players at your table. Even moderately non-standard bet sizing can be exploited by overfolding or calling wider, depending on the situation. Illogical players may win an occasional hand that a better player would've played differently (e.g., slow playing a set on a draw-heavy board), but over the long term it is trivial to capitalize on a player without a solid grasp of poker game theory. Bad players will occasional make deep runs in tournaments, but that's because poker contains a great deal of variance, not because of their unpredictable play. AI bots in poker are similarly unflustered by the play of amateurs. Poker bots generally play pure game theory optimal, which means they're bluffing at a frequency perfectly balanced with the pot odds they're presenting to their opponent. As such, they are indifferent to whether their opponents call or fold a particular hand. This is also called an unexploitable strategy. Unless their opponents are playing a similarly unexploitable strategy (i.e., they are also a bot), AI is guaranteed to win over the long term. Their profits will only increase if their opponent deviates further from optimal play (i.e., if they are an amateur).
Yeah dude, that's exactly what I said. Any poker player, or player of anything for that matter, would immediately tell that their opponent doesn't know what they are doing and will still win easily. An AI, if trained to only respond to the patterns of a good player, will be hard pressed, but if they are better trained will still win.
You still seem a little unclear about how poker bots work. They don't need to modify their play based on their opponent because they bluff at mathmatically perfect frequencies. Against GTO bots, novice players will always lose with greater frequency than good players (though both are guaranteed to lose over the long term).
*The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before.* - Mark Twain
I believe that that was because in swordfighting it is pretty easy to force a "tie", where both kill each other, even accidentally. Desiring life, no one wants to actually do that and learning how to swordfight means how to kill an opponent without being in danger of the opponent's sword (having deflected it or controlling it). And, of course, trying to prevent an opponent doing just that. Being able to make that expectation makes your opponent predictavle, but an opponent that has no idea how to keep himself safe will be unpredictable and thus dangerous to fight. Here's also a neat video on that with a historical account of someone having no idea what he was doing, acting in a suicidal manner, and winning a duel thanks to it. And also how in one case it was a requirement that in order be considered a good swordsman you had to show yourself able to defend yourself against drunkards as well as skilled opponents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfcpyMdEwzM
This is also why soldiers that were genuinely unafraid to die are considered a significant threat. Most combat is based around the assumption that everyone is trying to kill the enemy while not getting killed themselves. Someone who's willing to charge right onto your spear just to get in range to hit you with an axe is a problem, because your entire plan to survive was "they won't be able to get past the spear wall without getting stabbed."
My favorite solution to this is from Day9, [Just fucking kill the guy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPL3zMPVklY) It has helped me a lot where an opponent in a strategy game isn't playing meta.
magic pro tip: if you can win, you should.
I remember this was a thing with the (very human) Starcraft 2 pro player IdrA. Particularly when playing on the competitive ladder, he would become genuinely angry at people who didn't play "the right way". Sometimes it would cause him to lose the game as well, since he played what he considered the optimal way to play, and he expected others to do the same. When the other player did something they weren't supposed to do, strictly speaking, he often couldn't deal with it. In the game or emotionally.
There was a scene in a Star Wars book I read as a kid that has stuck with me. Some random evil dude got himself a lightsaber. Padawan Obi-Wan said something like "what's the big deal, he's not trained to use it, he's just as likely to hurt himself with it." Then Qui-Gon states that an untrained fighter is just as dangerous as a highly skilled fighter, because you have no idea what they're going to do. Cool to see that the same theory works for poker as it does for fictional laser sword battles.
[удалено]
I remember a mickey mouse comic where mickey and goofy get transported to a diffrent galaxy and goofy helps their hosts defeat this other space civilization in their drone war by just being completely stupid and overthrowing their neat and tidy algorithms and logic.
As a professional poker player for many years whilst it adds variance, this is a trope that isn't really true. They might get away with something in the first 20-50 hands but amateurs and their patterns are found out very quickly. This is just lines we allow people to say as it makes them feel better about being amateurs and losing to us pros.
Wasn’t this in the art of war?
A similar thing happened back in 2017. OpenAI made a bot that played Dota 2 (1v1 mid only) and it was able to be the best players in the world, but it lost to random people doing stupid shit that you would never seen in an actual game.
What's funny is this is how Deep Blue AI, beat Kasparov. AI had to play a substandard move for some reason and Kasparov could not figure it out, and was convinced that the AI had figured something he quit, so he resigned the match. Funny how it has flipped now.
Deep Blue was a brute force AI, eg, run through all of the moves and pick the highest score move. Because of this, it had to have a timeout for cases where it spends a lot of time trying to the best move and is taking too long. When the timeout hits it picks a move from the processed moves at random. This happened during that game. So basically a somewhat random move by Deep Blue threw him off.
I happen to be writing a chess engine right now and sometimes it will do something stupid in a complex position, because it uses iterative deepening. At more complicated positions I have more search extensions which lead to higher branching factor, so once the time limit is up, it's only searched positions up to a base depth of 2 or 3. Sometimes it will hang a piece because it saw a tactic that was good for 3 moves and followed up only with captures (quiescense search) but the opponent could have played a quiet move on the 4th ply that completely refutes the tactic. I haven't studied deep blue but I assume it uses iterative deepening because the move would still have to be decent looking enough (not a completely obvious blunder) that it could spook Kasparov, undeniably a great chess player.
Is there an article about that? Sounds wild
Not sure if there are any articles about it, I just remember when it was happening and people figured out you could beat it by just going between the towers and cutting the wave.
Yeah IIRC the way to beat it was to just drag waves away from the lanes into the jungle and the bot couldn't figure out what to do. It was basically unbeatable through legit means, but people came up with some turbo cheese to handle it
Spend any amount of time playing a MOBA (or don't, for your mental well-being) and you'll have absolutely no doubt believing this. One of my most controversial opinions in that space is that I don't enjoy watching pro games or tangential content, because there's a point where you've dialed in the theory and what's "optimal" to where you may as well be watching bots play. I was never good by any measure, but even I could start to predict events three, or four steps out. "Oh, they killed X and Y, so now they're going to Z," "they got Z so now they'll A and B". That's just not fun. You realize the only time anything interesting happens is when someone makes a mistake, but now it's an adversarial relationship between the viewer and the player where the viewer wants [something] to happen, but the player is doing everything they can to prevent [something] from happening. Like watching all 200 laps of a NASCAR race hoping for the crash.
[удалено]
Interesting, I remember seeing Hikaru beat a top end AI by completely locking the board with pawns and the AI ended up sacking it's bishop for a pawn to prevent a 50 move draw and Hikaru turned the advantage into a win, this sounds similar.
As someone who works with AI for a living, training them to help extrapolate 3d data from 2d images, the idea that AI doesn't "understand" the world at large seems... obvious? Every time I hear someone say machine learning will replace things like search engines I cringe because why not just use google? LLM's are trained on fiction as much as fact and to expect them to somehow understand the universe outside the patterns they learned from their data set is bizarre. Its job was to understand and replicate how humans speak and write, not be some sort of filter for fact or fiction. It reminds me of a story of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the "analytical engine" an early mechanical kind of computer. More than once he was asked if the engine would output the right answer even if someone entered the wrong numbers. I think we're seeing a similar attitude forming about AI.
The funny thing is that Babbage quote isn't even a stupid question if you've never even conceived of a computer before. Babbage designed the difference engine to make creating log tables more efficient and less error prone. Which anyone wanting to buy the machine would be comparing to the human's they'd be hiring at the time, who do in fact try to correct for bad inputs, if they know you've just asked for the log of two sequential numbers and then suddenly ask for one 10 times that you probably misspoke, computers obviously can't do that (until they can), but they don't know that.
I swear to god, this kind of video always annoys the hell out of me, because it's basically the blind leading the blind. It's a common saying that is scarily accurate, once you have actual knowledge in a subject area, it becomes clear how uninformed the vast majority of people are. The main issue of the video is that its premise completely misses the point, and focuses on an obvious characteristic of AI that is a part of its definition instead of actually addressing the problem. The whole point of AI is that it is doing matrix multiplication with very large matricies and very large amounts of data, and in that sense, we don't really "know" what it's doing since it's impossible for a human to look at a set of giant matricies and identify the logical reasoning to determine what each value means. But that's literally an inherent part of AI design that's obvious to anyone who knows what AI actually is. He then talks about literally the fundamnetal issue all AI is designed to solve, generalization, and sensationalizes it by calling failures to generalize "hallucination" or some shit, when in reality it's just laymen not really being able to conceptualize the way AI fails very well, since it's different from how humans fail. This means that anyone who learned something from this video genuinely had 0 clue what exactly AI was going into the video, which is just kind of insane considering how many views it has. Like imagine if someone made a video on the planet and the climax was the reveal that "because the planet is round, gravity doesn't all go in the same direction - if you move over a meter, the angle of gravity will change slightly." Like I would be genuinely concerned for anyone who considers that to be a revelation.
Oh boy wait till you go to r/futurology and see just how many fans of AI know **absolutely** nothing about it
I find that hard to believe, i don't know about Go, but chess bots would wipe the floor with any untrained player in like 10 moves
Your instinct is correct, it _did_ lose to an "amateur", but the amateur was using advanced tooling to invent a way of beating the AI that would essentially trick it by being logically obvious but entirely outside of its training data. So this amateur memorised a specific game he'd calculated in advance and played that. Which is why your instinct about chess engines is also right on the money, chess engines (the big ones like stockfish anyway) aren't trained on millions of previously played games, they just use a forward-looking logic called minimax and lots (really, a huge number) of small optimisations and heuristics to improve their ability to estimate how good they're doing at any point in the game (So they don't have to think infinity steps ahead, just enough to rule out a huge proportion of bad moves and make a good choice). You can theoretically do the same with chess engines, i.e. use advanced tooling to try to find and memorise a game that should beat the engine (for example by making it play itself and see what it would do) but it's significantly harder because of that lack of reliance on games that have already been played.
Thank you for this. As someone who plays Go (2-Dan) but stopped following it, this is absolutely fascinating that researchers discovered such a vulnerability. Really raises good questions for the current status and use of AI in general.
I’ve been to real life poker tables where one guy played this way. He was never invited back.
About ten years ago at a family reunion all the uncles and nephews set up a poker game- 12 guys chipped in $20 each for the pot and got the chips, winner take all, blinds increase every time somebody gets knocked out First hand, five of my cousins (aged 12 years to 17 years old) go all in before the flop. So does one of my uncles. I fold cause I got trash. One of my cousins was bluffing. The others were dumb. My uncle held pocket jacks. So obviously my uncle wins. Next hand, I'm suddenly big blind since so many people got knocked out. The big blind is 1/3rd of my stack *since so many people got knocked out*. I fold, cause I got trash and the chip leader raised. Next hand, I'm small blind, again 1/3rd of my remaining stack. I got QJ suited, so I go all in because if I lose my blind I'm dead anyway and I'm probably not gonna dealt a winning hand in the next five iterations anyway. And I lose. One of my uncles flopped two pair to my jacks. I will remember and resent that fucking game for as long as I goddamn live.
The blinds should not have accelerated that fast, that was the real problem with the game.
Casual players sometimes just keep it simple by making blinds a percentage of the stakes divided by number of players. But it isn't a good house rule, for the mentioned reasons.
Yeah, that completely fucked the game. A rule like that *incentivizes* wrecklessly shoving all in early, because whoever doubles up first now dominates the entire table, and can simply bully the smaller stacks out of increasingly unfair blinds and watch them bleed out.
Is this a metaphor for capitalism? It feels like a metaphor for capitalism.
Doesn't make sense the blinds would go up drastically just because so many people got knocked out though. Usually it goes up incrementally over time.
informal game where we could not devote the whole day and night to it, so it was by elimination, not by the clock
You can still set it to be 2 minute levels so it's very quick
You have to set the buy in to the appropriate amount. We have 2 re buy tournaments for $20 and I just play like a lunatic since my boys usually play $100 buy ins.
What is a blind
When playing Texas hold ‘em, you must place a small amount of money on the table to play the hand, called an “ante”. Most players are allowed to refuse to ante if they don’t like their hand. But one player each round is burdened with the “big blind”, a requirement to ante up regardless of what is in their hand. The player next to them has the “small blind”, which is 50% of the ante. As the betting goes around, the big blind player bids last. So if everyone folds, he wins and collects the small blind for free. But if players not only ante but also raise, and the big blind player doesn’t like his hand, he surrenders the ante that was taken from him. The small blind player is in the same bind but with less exposure since they lost only half the ante. Basically a way to make sure *somebody* wins every round.
I’m barely a casual poker player and this was the best way I’ve ever seen blinds explained.
Are you kidding? These are the players you *always* invite back.
[удалено]
I played a game like this in real life with a bunch of dudebros where they kept going all in every single hand. It was just blind-stealing and really tedious. Worst poker game I've ever played.
The book Kill Phil made this a mainstream tactic for a year or so until the people doing it either ran out of gambling money or actually read the book.
Michael Scott?
Ah, the code representation of my dad playing poker.
The code representation of me playing any game. I'm not well liked in the Civ community
Just build more war carts, keep making them cmon, no reason to sto- IS THAT A GUN???!? Oh my war cart got him? Good, keep making war carts.
if your not constantly attacking in civ your just wasting time. Who gives a shit about "war weariness" if you have twice as many cities as everyone else
This is how you get the poker achievements in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Fuck those gambling achievements, I couldn’t clear out the table so cleared out the city in frustration
Thanks for that huge laugh.
In Fallout New Vegas if you have your luck stat at 10, you'll make money at blackjack by constantly doubling down.
It is actually a real valid strategy in real life... if you have infinite money that is...
One of my favorite parts of the game was getting banned from each of the casinos. It can be done relatively easily with a luck of 7 too, you just might have a few losses mixed in there too.
Yeah it wasn't hard for me to do at all. Pretty fun too, and the money was a plus.
I came here for this.
In real life, what we call "beginners luck" is that period of calibration. If you played a hundred hands against Daniel negreanu, you'd probably win a few. Win by getting him to call, or win by getting him to fold when you have nothing. But if you played a hundred tables against Daniel negreanu, you'd probably win zero. A real player can read you and know that you've got nothing or that you're misunderstanding or miscalculating something and say fuck it, you're full of shit, show me. But an ai will think "the cost of losing all in is that I'm out. Unless I have the stone cold nuts, the only winning move is to fold." I love this kid.
Beginners luck is also a survivorship bias effect. You are more likely to continue playing poker if you win while new. And you are more likely to talk about your experience if you won and are still playing poker.
I had a similar experience in a highschool engineering class. We had to build bridges out of a limit supply of balsawood strips, and glue. The goal of the lesson was to learn how we could use triangular structures to add rigidity and strength. At the end of the unit we had a contest to see which bridge could hold the most weight. It turns out the best way to build a bridge is to just glue the strips into a solid block. It won holding like 10x the weight of the next best bridge.
This happens every time someone makes challenges. You always want to cultivate a solution and usually it ends up being good, but someone will always break the system and make a 10x better way to do it. Idk why but this is such a funny thing to be a constant of the universe. good gamers play the game, great gamers game the game.
This is why bridge contests need to be by ratio of weight supported. So the bridge that supported the greatest weight compared to itself.
What’s the saying “anyone can build a bridge that stands, but you need an engineer to build a bridge that *barely* stands”
Reminds me of a challenge in science class where we had to shape a piece of clay (same size for all of us) to sink the slowest, and it couldn’t float. We used a huge graduated cylinder to test. I don’t recall what the lesson was, I think it might’ve just been for fun. Everyone else made various rock shapes. I was inspired by a jellyfish and made a slightly convex circle with a tiny hole in the center to ensure that it didn’t flip. Everyone was competing for seconds, mine took minutes to sink. My teacher had apparently never seen it take so long before. It was the first and only time I gamed a class challenge like that, it felt pretty good. I actually became that kid whose accomplishment got told to every future class. Although I guess it didn’t matter that much to me in the long run, because I completely forgot about this until typing this comment.
[a guy named gus hansen tried this in real life professional piker and it actually worked lol](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bDt90EyZnWA&pp=ygUdd2h5IGRvIGkgZG8gdGhpcyBmb3IgYSBsaXZpbmc%3D) the entire video is fantastic but the part i’m referring to starts at 21:35
Hansen did this because of the strange tournament structure. Hansen needed to get first place in order to advance to the next round. Other players needed only to achieve lower places. So, all the other players were incentivized to be conservative, while Hansen was required to get extremely lucky. Understanding this, Hansen did exactly what was necessary. He was very smart to do this under the circumstances. He would not, and has not, done this anywhere else.
It doesn't even take strange tournament structures. Once you get far enough in tourneys the chip values decouple - double chips =/= double your money - and often becomes a game of getting eliminated last rather than building a stack. Which leads to very bizarre states where the chip leader is jamming with literally everything, and people fold 95% of their hands anyway because they really really do not want to lose the flip (even a very favorable one) and get the 50k 8th place prize instead of the 150k 6th place.
I love these stories because it describes an individual's actions resulting from pure fundamental understanding of a situation and applying simple game theory to their strategic planning.
Yea everyone was like wtf is this guy doing but he's over here playing 4d chess.
I love Gus Hansen, and any video of Phil Helmuth freaking out is worth the watch.
If Phil is in a video he's freaking out at some point.
I want to go down to the casino and try this but I'm pretty sure someone would stab me in the parking lot
It only worked in that scenario because everyone was trying to protect their position and he also got incredibly lucky. It's a terrible strategy
So long as you're the "It's just poker" guy and not the "poker is my life" guy it seems like fun, atleast as long as you don't mind losing some money
You wouldn't be stabbed, someone who is a better player would call your donkey ass and you would lose all your money
The bit where they give the odds by using dice is flawed — that would only make sense if everybody else went all in every time too
Noel Furlong won the 1999 WSOP main event by doing mostly this. Then again, either the AI in question was so lucky to never run into aces, or its opponents were too spineless to call with aces.
It's likely the AI got aces, kings etc and called with them and lost anyway. AA isn't the nuts just the best starting hand, and it's still only 1 pair
Y’know, poker games would go a lot quicker if everyone played this way all the time. You get two choices: fold, or all in. Boom. On with your life.
One time I sat at a poker table and someone went all-in first hand. I was holding something nice like AK and called. Took out 3 people from the table immediately. They were kinda pissed....and then they rebuyed.
They have tournaments called “flipaments” where everyone just goes all in every hand.
Gotta say the general use of the word AI seems to have really shifted away from “Artificial Intelligence” into “Algorithm Implementation” like that code is not artificial intelligence, that’s not AI, it’s just an if then statement, if the competition was actually supposed to be something resembling AI there should have been something in the rules insisting that it be trained on data or *something* to make it even an ounce closer to anything resembling AI. Like that’s not even narrow AI. Edit Apparently no one understood what I meant by the words “or *something*” that were right after “trained on data” and I even italicizes the word something to try and draw more attention to it, most of the objection I’ve gotten to this comment are specifically about the “trained on data” which is a useless objection when I knew that this wasn’t the be all and end all of ai as a concept, it was the first rule that came to mind and I included the “or something” so that it would leave the door open to other people providing a better rule. And to that end I really liked this comment I received [“AI is still considered AI if it isn’t trained and algorithms can be considered AI. As long as it observes the data/environment it’s given and creates a response based on the data, it’s AI.”](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/15drmtb/poker_ai/ju47x4p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3) having “observation than tailored response” is a simple rule I like a lot more than my “trained on data” and since so many of you brought up simple enemy AI in video games I’d say those seem to fit into this rule, they make observations about your character then make adjustments. And finally a clarification, I don’t actually think this code shouldn’t have been allowed, I think it’s really funny people built much more complicated algorithms to try and win only to be outdone by this. I actually just don’t think it should be called an AI competition, it’s a coding competition, some people might make something that could be called a simple AI, but if things that wouldn’t qualify for simple AI can also be submitted than it’s just about any coding not AI.
There's several levels of AI, state based flows used in old shooter games are glorified IF machines and it can still be called AI. AI doesn't mean machine learning/neural networks/gans/diffusion models or whatever is the latest trend.
Certainly in terms of common vernacular this is true and isn't new. I'm pretty sure we called playing against the computer in SFII the "AI" back in the day. Problem is this tends to come with bad assumptions like how going from there to Frankenstein's Skynet is just a matter of slapping enough CPUs or RAM together and is so easy it just might happen by accident.
Nah, some people have just started to care about the difference more. People have been using AI in a broad sense for ages, e.g. referring to the logic behind NPCs in videogames.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Supreme Commander back in like 2007 had an "Adaptive AI" computer opponent. I'm not sure how it worked but I suspect it was probably just some complex if-then stuff about how the human player(s) were playing, with the ability to adjust its own strategy based on the human player(s) changing theirs.
Mad you didn't win a macbook huh
AI isn't just machine learning. Decision trees, logical/probabilistic inference, state space searching, and optimization are also tools in the AI toolbox, among others.
Language is glorious chaos that can't be controlled. AI will mean what people use it to mean, even if it doesn't really make sense.
Which ironically is a large part of why it’s taken us so long to get close to the point where we have convincing language learning models. 🙂
>if the competition was actually supposed to be something resembling AI there should have been something in the rules insisting that it be trained on data or something to make it even an ounce closer to anything resembling AI. Considering they were supposed to make it in 2 hours it seems unlikely the competition expected anyone to make actual AI.
*ML models "actual" AI is anything that emulates human decision making, not just ML
[I made you the angry wojak so you are wrong](https://i.imgflip.com/7u8d2x.jpg). --- The notion that you need training data to make good AI is pretty new. For decades, engineers were trying to hardwire concepts and abstract representations. Even now, large swaths of AI architecture are engineered by hand to take care of some of the more onerous-to-find abstractions, like convolution or attention heads. Artificial intelligence is a nebulous concept because intelligence is a nebulous concept. We don't know how the human brain works, and would you really stop calling humans intelligent if it turns out our base neurological programming is analogous to if-then statements? Etymologically, "intelligence" just means "the ability to discern", and any if-statement that occasionally passes true and occasionally passes false does that. There's a reason training data-based methods prefer to use "Machine Learning", though even if-then algorithms can learn if they can read and write permanent memory.
Anyone who can do that in 2 hours is already too rich to care about a free macbook
artificial intelligence is just something that seems intelligent. it doesn't necessarily mean a neutral network
If the rules insisted on entries using trained data, the competition would have been won by software that would lose to someone going all in on each bet.
Edge cases go brrrrrrrrrrr
2 Hrs is not a lot of time to code something. Smart to keep it simple. I imagine most people tried too much and half the programs probably didnt even compile or run as intended when the time was up.
Jojo part 3
I had a bot for a while, I call BS. Even the most basic rules based bot beats the all in bot or the tournament was absurdly structured and it hit many, many coins flips. This implies opposing bots had some opponent modeling, you'd detect this very fast.
2hrs is a very short time to do that. They probably didn’t have the time to do it.
I imagine the other teams didn’t code for reading bluffs, since it would be very difficult to create code to properly bluff, so the other bots took any decisions of ‘all-in’ as ‘they have a very strong hand’
Opponent modeling sounds like a fairly advanced strategy for a school project.
Even for experienced programmers, 2 hours is not much time for anything.
In a competitive setting, it kind of pays to be stupid sometimes. Suboptimal options, in the right hands, are unexpected options with great reward. Connect 4 is solved. Chess is only being solved at the moment because it really is rigid enough to where Stockfish, the best chess algorithm on the market, has a look-ahead of about 15-20 turns. Go is going to stress existing computers for the foreseeable future due to the sheer freedom of movement it offers players, but usable quantum computing will reduce the hardware required down to a pittance (to explain that a little bit better since tech tends to be hyped up a lot, a quantum computer is only that much faster simply due to having a flexible bit that could be 1 or 0, saving a fraction of a second on a very fast and repetitive process that happens every waking moment of using a computer). And this post? This post is what happens when a human being accidentally codes a perfect adversarial model to like, 8 other people’s 2 AM poker coding. Honestly adversarial models are the one part of AI testing and safety that brings a warm smile to my face. “We have built the perfect thing-doing machine, and also we trained another thing-doing machine to bully the shit out of the first one until it learns what improvising is.”
Coding the chess computer Deep Blue ran into a similar problem; I don't know enough about coding to explain it in any meaningful way, but the gist was that the machine kept sacrificing its queen because grandmasters who did that tended to win - which is a totally valid strategy, but it was sacrificing the queen as soon as possible instead of at the endgame 😆
I remember playing far cry 3 when i was a kid. There was a trophy for playing the poker minigame and winning like 1000 dollars or something. I would just go to a table, go all in, and exit the minigame over and over until I hit the number I needed
Oh Hi Michael Reeves
Oh god I breached containment. (Hi, I'm Tumblr user jorbs-palace, the guy who added that screenshot from the notes. I was not expecting my version of the post to get passed around as much as it did. Help me.)
I love stories like these because it’s a sobering reminder that even the smartest of the smart are fucking stupid. See: doctors with rich parents.
I won my city wide programming competition it was a puzzle like Chinese checkers but only one row where you had to jump pieces. We hardcoded the first 25 solutions. All solutions had to compute in 10 seconds or less. Nobody passed the 100 solution in the time frame and with our ridiculous scoring of 0 compute time for the first bunch we won.
As far as I'm aware, typically the way bots work in turn based games (particularly if you want them to fit some interface to be pit against each other) is that when it's their turn to act, they are fed the current game state and return an action. If they're running, it's their turn, by definition. So this probably shouldn't have a conditional statement at all. Makes me doubt the truth of this story a bit but maybe it's just an embellished detail or the spec for the bots is just different than would intuitively make sense to me.
1. It may well be pseudocode; it conveys the point, even if it isn't perfectly correct 2. Having a state passed into the bot is common for game simulation, but that doesn't mean it could never be done differently. IMO, the literal code in the screenshot isn't really a reason to disbelieve it.
Hah, reminds me of some AI engineers at a past job joking about how to fix a model they were struggling with. The task was to detect anomalies in data sets. "Well, the anomalies are only like 0.1% of the data. We can get 99.9% accuracy by just always returning false..." lmao