In plain words: A computer learns poker by playing against itself, blending past strategies so it can't be exploited, without hand-built game simplifications. On small poker it neared the balanced unbeatable strategy while ordinary learning methods fell apart, and on Texas Hold'em it matched expert-built superhuman play.
Abstract · Deep Reinforcement Learning from Self-Play in Imperfect-Information Games
Many real-world applications can be described as large-scale games of imperfect information. To deal with these challenging domains, prior work has focused on computing Nash equilibria in a handcrafted abstraction of the domain. In this paper we introduce the first scalable end-to-end approach to learning approximate Nash equilibria without prior domain knowledge. Our method combines fictitious self-play with deep reinforcement learning. When applied to Leduc poker, Neural Fictitious Self-Play (NFSP) approached a Nash equilibrium, whereas common reinforcement learning methods diverged. In Limit Texas Holdem, a poker game of real-world scale, NFSP learnt a strategy that approached the performance of state-of-the-art, superhuman algorithms based on significant domain expertise.
Johannes Heinrich, David Silver
arXiv:1603.01121 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.GT · submitted Mar 3, 2016 · updated Jun 28, 2016
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