8/22/06 Crash

Aaron Rowand is having himself a tough season.

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Poker is inspiring new research in Artificial Intelligence. In comparing poker to chess, chess is a game of perfect information. The position of your opponent is known at all times. In poker, however, it is a game of imperfect information where the players guess and infer the holdings of the opponent(s):

"The nice thing about chess as a property of the game is what we call perfect information. You look at the board, you know where all the pieces are, you know whose turn it is - you have complete knowledge of the game," he said.

"But in the real world, knowing everything is just so rare. Everything we do all day long is all about partial information. So poker's much more representative of what the real world's like, and in that sense it becomes a much harder problem."

"The end result is that we're going to learn more in terms of research outcomes from poker than we ever did from chess."

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I love arrogant Russians. This dude solved one of the Millennium Problems and decided not to receive his medal. Or his $1,000,000 prize. I got as far as trying to pronounce Poincare Conjecture and that was hard enough by itself.

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It goes without saying - But I'm going to say it anyways - Weird Al RULES!