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[eHalcyon]

i thought the movies were OK, but they don't stand out to me enough to say one is better than another.  Books aren't always better than the movie, but they certainly are with Harry Potter. 

I do remember being disappointed with Goblet of Fire.  It was my favourite of the books, but the length of the movie vs. the book definitely meant a lot had to be cut.  There were some changes that stood out a lot to me.

[Teproc]

I only watched like half the movies. Was generally extremely unimpressed. I recall that PoA was just ruined for me by the stupid looking werewolf.

It doesn't take much for you to ruin a movie then...

[eHalcyon]

Security issues.

[AHoppy]

i thought the movies were OK, but they don't stand out to me enough to say one is better than another.  Books aren't always better than the movie, but they certainly are with Harry Potter. 

I do remember being disappointed with Goblet of Fire.  It was my favourite of the books, but the length of the movie vs. the book definitely meant a lot had to be cut.  There were some changes that stood out a lot to me.

And this is why I think goblet of fire was the worst movie

[AHoppy]

Also, I just finished reading Golden Son, the sequel to Red Rising, and wow... I don't know what to do with myself now... It's like finishing a GoT all over again (which I did about a week ago)

[Kirian]

Poker is over.  Well, at least Texas Hold-em is.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/game-theorists-crack-poker/

[liopoil]

Poker is over.  Well, at least Texas Hold-em is.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/game-theorists-crack-poker/

*two player limit texas hold-em

[silverspawn]

incapable of losing against any opponent in a fair game”.

eh... that's impossible, because you can just have better cards? or does fair mean everyone has the same luck? no game is fair then.

[silverspawn]

Of course, no poker algorithm can be mathematically guaranteed to win every game, because the game involves a large element of chance based on the hand you’re dealt. But Bowling and his colleagues have demonstrated that their algorithm always wins in the long run.

ah, fair enough

[ashersky]

Michael Bowling and his colleagues at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, along with Finnish software developer Oskari Tammelin, plays perfectly, to all intents and purposes.

We've found Eevee, I think.

[KingZog3]

Michael Bowling and his colleagues at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, along with Finnish software developer Oskari Tammelin, plays perfectly, to all intents and purposes.

We've found Eevee, I think.

Let's go to his door, ring the doorbell and run! Teeheehee!

[scott_pilgrim]

I feel like the article leaves out the most interesting part: how does the bot play?  How often does it bluff?  How often does it slow play?  How aggressive is it?  How important is position?  What percentage of hands does it play?  How often does it take the pot with the weaker hand?  And for me the most interesting question would be, if it plays against itself, what percentage of hands make it to showdown?

It's pretty surprising to me that limit hold 'em is now solved (even only for heads up), I would have guessed at least another 5-10 years.  But still, I think we're a long, long way off from solving no limit hold 'em, which is a much more interesting and popular game anyway.

[Seprix]

http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/600997

What happens when you combine me with boredom, 80s synths, and an actual videogame track I'm supposed to be making.

[Titandrake]

I feel like the article leaves out the most interesting part: how does the bot play?  How often does it bluff?  How often does it slow play?  How aggressive is it?  How important is position?  What percentage of hands does it play?  How often does it take the pot with the weaker hand?  And for me the most interesting question would be, if it plays against itself, what percentage of hands make it to showdown?

After Googling around, it seems like the original paper has some stats on how it plays - for instance, it called on the first action 0.06% of the time. The actual paper is going to be trickier to get access to.

I'm not sure if that's from a large sample of possible states, or explicitly from every possible state. For qualitative questions, it's very hard to quantify some of them, and it's entirely possible the bot pays wildly differently on states that appear to be similar in value, so at best you can hope that you can play the bot yourself somehow...

[liopoil]

I actually met this guy last summer; he said he had it down to one milli-big blind off the nash equilibrium, but hadn't published yet. I guess now he has

[Titandrake]

I actually met this guy last summer; he said he had it down to one milli-big blind off the nash equilibrium, but hadn't published yet. I guess now he has

Huh - my impression was that it wasn't the exact solution to the nash equilibirum, and was generated from a very, very large sample of actual game states of poker. Maybe I'm wrong though. Or, maybe they did it over all states, and worked on it til convergence. That way, it's not necessarily exactly perfect because of built-in limitations to how accurately the computer can represent decimals, but it's close enough to not even matter.

[qmech]

I actually met this guy last summer; he said he had it down to one milli-big blind off the nash equilibrium, but hadn't published yet. I guess now he has

Huh - my impression was that it wasn't the exact solution to the nash equilibirum, and was generated from a very, very large sample of actual game states of poker. Maybe I'm wrong though. Or, maybe they did it over all states, and worked on it til convergence. That way, it's not necessarily exactly perfect because of built-in limitations to how accurately the computer can represent decimals, but it's close enough to not even matter.

The "poker is solved" headline has been giving me mathematical twinges too.  Going on nothing else but the news coverage, this is roughly what I'm imagining has happened.

I've a vague idea I heard once that, in the same way that there's an algorithm that will provide a proof for any provable statement, there's an algorithm that is asymptotically optimal at playing games (or maybe it was trading, or perhaps there's no difference).  The idea is that you just try all of the possible strategies and measure how well they all do, and spend progressively more of your time using the better ones.  So what I imagine is that an algorithm like this has been run on this type of poker for a really long time, and that all of the clever work has gone into making it remotely computationally feasible.

[liopoil]

Right, the exact perfect strategy isn't known, but I guess it is known just how good it is. Their solution loses on average 1000th of a big blind each hand against a perfect strategy.

[GeoLib]

If you (or your educational institution) have the proper subscriptions, you can find the paper here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6218/145

[Elanchana]

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

[heron]

For some reason Elanchana's message isn't marked as read for me, even though I read it several times and even hit the mark all as read button. Weird.

Edit: Fixed now that I posted. Still weird.

[Awaclus]

For some reason Elanchana's message isn't marked as read for me, even though I read it several times and even hit the mark all as read button. Weird.

Are you sure you didn't hit the "mark unread" button by accident?

[heron]

For some reason Elanchana's message isn't marked as read for me, even though I read it several times and even hit the mark all as read button. Weird.

Are you sure you didn't hit the "mark unread" button by accident?

Quite certain. Oh well, it seems to be fixed now; your post did not have that problem.

[Witherweaver]

That's just your subconscious telling you you missed something important in her message.

[sudgy]

For some reason Elanchana's message isn't marked as read for me, even though I read it several times and even hit the mark all as read button. Weird.

Edit: Fixed now that I posted. Still weird.

It's happened to me several times before too...