Monday 27 August 2012

The Texan's performance so far

After a few weeks the Texan has been doing quite well.  Having played 123 games the Texan has won 74 games.  I'm fairly happy about that.  More won than lost. 

There are a few things that I have learned as part of making this poker player.  The main one is that you need to think about the inputs to an artificial neural network.  You may provide information that is required for the game, but you need to consider how easily it would be possible to evolve a network to interpret the inputs in the correct way.  Could you pass in the information in a different form which would make evolution easier?

I am also thinking about potential new projects.  I could expand on poker and make the Texan even better, or could move on to other areas, like Blackjack, Roulette or other casino games.  Or obviously I could go back to Desert Rat.  I have neglected it a bit due to having to work on the Texan and maybe I should look at that again.  I am not sure at the moment, I might give it a few days and have a good think.

Friday 10 August 2012

The Texan after 2 weeks

Ok, so Beat The Texan has been a Facebook app for two weeks now (http://apps.facebook.com/beatthetexan/ if you want the link).  So far I have to admit I haven't had the number of plays that I had expected, however, something is better than nothing.

I have included 4 different Texans in the game that are selected to play at random every a new game is started.  Overall The Texans have played 45 games and won 25.  Three of the Texans have a win rate of approximately 50-50 with the final Texan at around 70-30 to the Texan.

I am pretty happy with these results and it goes some way to showing that it is possible to evolve competitive poker players.  Admittedly, they aren't great players, but they are competitive.