Author: Ricardo Gibert
Date: 05:34:10 07/27/03
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On July 26, 2003 at 18:23:31, Graham Laight wrote: >Finally, I got around to doing what I've been promising to do for a long time. > >Since nearly everyone who plays my matching pennies game chooses to have 49 >goes, I've tuned the pattern recogniction algorithm to work best at this level. >You should now find it noticeably harder to beat than it was before. > >http://mysite.freeserve.com/grahamlaight/jscript/GuessWhichHand.htm > >Have fun - and don't forget to post your game records here, please! > >Take care, >-g Such programs try to take advantage of non-random play of the opponent. In order to do so, it must also play in a non-random way. This leaves it vulnerable to a sophisticated opponent. The more aggressive the program is in taking advantage of non-random play, the more non-random its own play must be and the more vulnerable it is. For example, someone posted a link on a usenet group to precisely the same game you tackle. The programmer even dressed it up a bit with a high scores list. This had the desired effect of encouraging participation. Unfortunately, the program was very agressive to the point of being completely deterministic. A number of jokers realized this and worked out the precise sequence required to win with a nearly perfect score! I was one of them, but not as patient as some of the others at working out a really long sequence that won consistently. Interestingly, despite this going on, there were enough unsophisticated players to give the program a very comfortable plus score overall. It seems the sophisticated players were too few in number to really hurt it. Kind of the same situation as in Las Vegas and the BlackJack card counters. I did not do a lot of testing, but I think your program does not seem to be very aggressive. It can't be taken advantage of as ruthlessly as the aforementioned program, but I'm not sure if this is really the best way. Maybe the best way is to rely on the much greater abundance of unsophisticated players. It would be interesting to compare both approaches on a large pool of players. It may be best to be aggressive, but not so aggressive that it becomes easy to join the sophisticated group of players. Ruthlessness should require hard work!
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