Yoshimi Battles the Poker Playing Robots
Good series of posts from Professor Bainbridge, Raffi Melkonian, and Will Baude about cheating in online poker using poker-playing computer programs, or bots. The article that started it all is here.
They’re all right, more or less. Using bots to win money from legit players is despicable behavior. Using “cheat sheets” or odds tables is somewhat similar, but these are not generally banned by the game rooms (I don’t think, at least). This type of thing was presumably the basis for the first generation of poker-playing algorithms, and, of course, given enough time, you can simulate a bot’s algorithm on paper and play that way. And there’s also the game-within-a-game aspect of it, where the bot-makers and game rooms are playing cat and mouse. This same thing happens in all online games (did anyone else play Diablo/Diablo II? Remember how ridiculous things got between the cheaters and the game developers there?).
The problem here is a failure to distinguish between two groups–I think of them as the bot-makers and the bot-users, but this isn’t a good distinction. The difference I’m trying to get at here is in the person’s intent.
My “bot-makers” are the engineers, the programmers, the ones who want to see if they can make a program that can beat people at poker and can look enough like a human player to evade detection by the poker rooms. They want to see what they can do inside this system. There’s an intellectual curiosity I ascribe to this sort of person. They are–more or less–the people Will Baude seems to be talking about when he describes the sport of rule-breaking.
My concept of “bot-users” is more along the lines of Professor Bainbridge’s targets. These are the people that buy or download the bot programs. They don’t make the bots. They don’t really care about how the bots work. Their aim is to make money off as many suckers as possible.
Of course, there’s all kinds of overlap here. From the article, it sounds like the bot-makers are in it–at least partially–for the money too, so the distinction isn’t really that useful. There’s a lot of the idealistic hacker ethic in here, and in Will’s post, though he doesn’t refer to it as such.
Ignoring the rules of the poker rooms for a minute, I feel that to the extent someone is a bot-user, their actions are morally worse than the actions of the bot-maker. For the one group, the goal is to cheat people out of money, whereas for the other group, it is an intellectual challenge. The harm to other players is an unfortunate side effect. The problem is that you can’t just write a poker-playing program and leave it at that. You have to test it under real conditions. You have to test it heavily against real human opponents playing for money. Poker rooms have to keep their reputation as a fair place to play, so they have to ban bots to keep their human players from leaving.
So of course, both the bot-makers and the bot-users are cheating the legitimate players. They’re breaking the rules of the poker room and possibly the law as well. still, it feels like there’s a moral difference between the two. It’s probably nothing the law would acknowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. That would just mean the law isn’t perfect.
Update: Raffi got to it before I did, and says what I wanted to in 1/2 the words. Oh well.