Sunday 29 April 2012

Using CUDA to speed up evolution?

Now that generations are competitive, each one is taking around 3-4 hours to complete on an AMD tri-core PC.  I looked into CUDA to see if it would increase the speed and reduce generation time.
CUDA is Compute Unified Device Architecture. It allows tasks to be passed to the graphics card so that the GPU's ability to run massively parallel tasks could be utilised.
This would have been ideal for the task of playing many games of poker, the downside is that all work would have to be written in and compiled in a special language for the graphics card to run.  I have already written alot of code in Java and didn't like the idea of replicating it.
So although CUDA seems great, I don't think it would be ideal for this task.

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Beat The Texan has a website

Well, it sort of has a website.
There is a landing page at www.paulspokerproject.co.uk.  There will eventually be:
  • a link so you can play against The Texan
  • info on how the research was conducted (how the neural networks and genetic algorithms work together and problems that had to be overcome)
  • results so you can see how many people The Texan has taken money from

Tuesday 24 April 2012

The Texan has got better

After a while of evolving, the Texan has started to learn how to play well and appears to be getting very competitive (over a series of 5+ games he has not been beaten against the few that have played him, me included).

Further details of how to play against the Texan will be posted soon along with screen shots.