CUDA for poker hand evaluation

Further to my discussion on CUDA in my previous post, it seems that some work has been done before in using CUDA for hand evaluation.
More information can be found here:
http://www.ii.metu.edu.tr/coursewebsites/quda/cuda_zone/report.htm

In this report, CUDA was used to compare all possible hand combinations providing performance improvements.  However, in my work I am using a large random sample of hands to provide a reasonably accurate, but not exact, result.  If anything, using a sample should enable a computer poker player to play more like a human since humans often don't know the exact strength of their hand, using a upper and lower bound instead.

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.

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

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.

Beat The Texan - Interesting AI reading

I thought I would share some of the stuff I have been reading that has been helping me evolve better poker players.  These two papers have been good:

This paper discusses training an artificial neural network to model human behaviour:
http://spaz.ca/aaron/school/ (Accessed 19th February 2012) Davidson A (1999) Using Artificial Neural Networks to Model Opponents in Texas Hold'em

 This paper shows how to evolve a poker player by competing against a heuristic opponent:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.5380 (Accessed 19th February 2012) Barone L., While L. (1998) Evolving Computer Opponents to Play a Game of Simplified Poker

Desert Rat - Vehicles?

All good run and gun platformers need to have a series of quality vehicles with some high powerful weaponry mounted on them.

What about the Desert Rat riding on the back of this guy?

Lasers and machine guns at the ready :-)

(What is that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montauk_Monster)

Hello and Welcome to PM Gaming

Hi

This is my first dive into computer game development and this blog is going to be about the games being developed and how they grow over time.  I'd love to hear any comments on what you think of them.

The two games being worked on at the moment are going to be on Android.  They are: Beat The Texan and Desert Rat.

Beat The Texan

Beat The Texan is a single player heads up texas hold'em poker game. What makes this different to other poker games out there is that The Texan is a naturally evolved poker player. He doesn't know what your cards are or what they are going to be, he knows exactly what a normal human player knows and plays (or will do) in the same way as a human player.

The geeky-bit :-) : The Texan is a neural network based poker player.  I have evolved a series of players using genetic algorithms and The Texan is the best one I have found so far.  I will admit, he is not great at the moment, but evolution is happening all the time so when better players become available, they will be integrated into the game.

I would like to introduce... The Texan:

This is a screen shot from the dev version on my PC, I will be adding screen shots for the Android version when they are available.

Desert Rat

Desert Rat is a platform shooter inspired by games like the Metal Slug series, Commander Keen and a few others.  You are the Desert Rat, thrown in behind enemy lines tasked with killing the psychotic Terrorist Cats and getting out alive.

Below is a really early screen shot of one of my development version:

I aim to also do a version of Desert Rat optimised for the Sony Xperia Play.

That's all for now, I'll be back with more posts giving more info on:

• the back stories of The Texan and The Desert Rat (who they really are)
• how development is going
• more general game info

and potentially putting up links for applet based demo versions.