On 7/26/07, chrilly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is a remarkable result. I think poker is more difficult than Go and of course chess. My hypothesis (its just a hypothesis) for the success is. There is someone - Dave Billings - who worked for many years very consequently on the topic. And he is able to motivate a lot of other good people to go along with him. And he gets probably also a lot of support from his boss, J.Schaeffer. And of course, there is some prospect to win fame and money.
I think you mean Darse Billings. Playing internet poker used to be accomplished only by using <shudder> IRC </shudder>, and Darse was one of the first to "automate" IRC poker, at first with aliases that folks just shared with each other, informally, then later with gui front-ends, but the back-end was still IRC. I had the privilege of being on the IRC poker server when "Poki" made its first appearance. "Poki" was the first incarnation of Darse's poker "bot", and it not only played a respectable game of Texas Hold 'Em, it would also respond to chat requests such as "Poki, quote Steve", wherupon it would reproduce a joke by comedian Stephen Wright. Darse was not only smart, he was very friendly and helpful to folks, even those who, although they lacked computer knowledge, wanted to play online poker. Such was the infancy of internet poker. Then along came the world-wide web, and now there are dozens, if not hundreds, of poker servers and their associated clients; it has become a multimillion-dollar industry.
The conditions for solving a problem are always at least as important than the problem itself. Maybe are the conditions in Poker better than in Go.
There is certainly more money to be made in poker than in go. -- Rich _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
