World-class interpretable poker

Abstract We address the problem of interpretability in iterative game solving for imperfect-information games such as poker. This lack of interpretability has two main sources: first, the use of an uninterpretable feature representation, and second, the use of black box methods such as neural networ...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bertsimas, Dimitris (Author), Paskov, Alex (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-06-13T18:20:24Z.
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Online Access:Get fulltext
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100 1 0 |a Bertsimas, Dimitris  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Paskov, Alex  |e author 
245 0 0 |a World-class interpretable poker 
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856 |z Get fulltext  |u https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/142962.2 
520 |a Abstract We address the problem of interpretability in iterative game solving for imperfect-information games such as poker. This lack of interpretability has two main sources: first, the use of an uninterpretable feature representation, and second, the use of black box methods such as neural networks, for the fitting procedure. In this paper, we present advances on both fronts. Namely, first we propose a novel, compact, and easy-to-understand game-state feature representation for Heads-up No-limit (HUNL) Poker. Second, we make use of globally optimal decision trees, paired with a counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) self-play algorithm, to train our poker bot which produces an entirely interpretable agent. Through experiments against Slumbot, the winner of the most recent Annual Computer Poker Competition, we demonstrate that our approach yields a HUNL Poker agent that is capable of beating the Slumbot. Most exciting of all, the resulting poker bot is highly interpretable, allowing humans to learn from the novel strategies it discovers. 
546 |a en 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Machine Learning