[FRIAM] lurking

Sun Nov 7 23:26:36 EST 2021

So... yeah... if Steve was in a conversation with me, and tried to act
proud of beating his drunk buddies in poker... that's exactly what I was
agreeing would be cringe... but nothing that he said has any connection
with the type of strategy that goes into professional poker playing. Why
not point out that the main technical skill in chess or go is "to play less
poorly than the other player"? Obviously that's what you are trying to do,
but what does that mean, and how do you pull it off against opponents who
have dedicated several thousand hours to studying the game?

Like, here is an hour-long seminar, with simulations, that JUST covers some
aspects of how you should play the turn card in Texas Holdem when you are
in a middle position versus the big blind. Matt starts out summarizing how
you get to that point, then the solver comes about 7 minutes in: Improve
your Turn Strategy with Matt Affleck - YouTube
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl4MpNxS_3M>   ..--- If I ran into Matt, I
suspect he'd be pretty humble... but if he was proud of how good he was at
poker, I wouldn't think that was cringy at all... I've probably watched
20-40 hours of his videos, and the way he's manipulating the simulations,
the concepts he's extracting from them, AND his ability to sit down and
implement those strategies is impressive.
<echarles at american.edu>

This book is 480 pages about the modern conception of game theory optimal
play, and I doubt any academic book about game theory is going to have
better explanations of what game theory is trying to accomplish:   Modern
Poker Theory: Building an unbeatable strategy based on GTO principles:
Acevedo, Michael: 9781909457898: Amazon.com: Books
<https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Poker-Theory-unbeatable-principles/dp/1909457892#customerReviews>
-
I've chatted with Michael online, and he's way more humble than he should
be. He has videos where he chats with Bert Stevens, who is off and on the
#1 player in the world, and they are awesomely educational.

On Sun, Nov 7, 2021 at 9:23 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

>
> On 11/7/21 12:02 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>
> There must be some kind of “Back to the future” movie that can be made out
> of this.  Doyne Farmer in Vegas all over again, but with current-era AI in
> place of toe-operated computers.
>
> Yah!  Surely Casinos can't begin to restrict computers(phones)/earbuds,
> etc.  on the gaming floor.
>
> Strange coincidence that my sister went to Kindergarten with Vance Packard
> (Norm's brother) in Silver City long before they all became eagle scouts
> and then the Chaos Cabal.  We moved away the next year and I doubt I ever
> met any of them back then.   I came to LANL just before (I think) Doyne
> came... I seem to remember that Norm was there for a summer...  and soon
> came the (in)famous CA conference...   As I remember it the game of
> interest (aside from Life, what with Conway in attendance) was GO with a
> lot of speculation about the implications of local vs global
> "intelligence"...   I was intrigued by HashLife and it's implications for
> finding structure at many scales... I still hope for someone with more
> follow-through than I have to implement a more redundant but "thorough"
> space-time decomposition (an N-1xN-1 kernel over the 4 positions at each
> "zoom" level).
>
> Regarding poker.. I played some low-stakes in college and saw there were
> two things to take in:   the main technical skill was to simply play less
> poorly than the other players at the table and that was entirely
> overshadowed by the social-engineering games of bluffing, etc.   The very
> simple game-theoretic aspect of not depleting your own stake before you
> catch a "lucky streak" going your way was also a good understanding.   I
> played with my "boss" and a number of peers at the time and realized that
> it was more about jockeying for position at work and drinking beer than it
> was about winning/losing.  I think the most I ever lost/won was on the
> order of $20-$40 which in those days was roughly 1-2 shifts wages... a LOT
> if I joined them weekly... too rich for my blood!  I still feel that
> *technically* playing well really means just playing less badly.
> Blackjack being even more obviously so?
>
>
> Yikes.
>
>
>
> On Nov 7, 2021, at 1:56 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
> My inclination would be to invest in standoff biometrics (e.g. Eulerian
> Video Amplification) and then find the best poker playing code.   It ought
> to be possible to automate and perhaps get rich in the process.
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Eric Charles
> *Sent:* Sunday, November 7, 2021 7:42 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>
> I DID read all the thread so far... but I'm curious how we got to one of
> the starting points: "as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of
> their Poker prowess"
>
> I am somewhat satisfied with my Poker mediocrity, certainly not proud of
> it... but if I met someone who was ACTUALLY startlingly better than I am,
> and they were proud of that, I wouldn't find it cringy. (Ditto in my other
> hobbies, like Aikido.)
>
> I guess if I met someone who had a slight edge in their drunk-buddy home
> games, and they were super proud of THAT, then i would find it cringy.
> (Ditto someone who's the best Aikido student in their small dojo, but who's
> obviously not more than that.)
>
> When I see academic work on game theory, it's usually of lower quality
> than what the good poker players are doing these days. Mastering the game
> is crazy hard, and being able to sit down and implement a coherent and
> winning strategy for 40-80 hours a week is not easy. So... why would that
> be cringe?
>
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2021 at 1:42 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
> Ok, part of the story is knowing what is really needed for reproducibility
> as a function of context.
> With that, then there's the matter of how much control is afforded.   Is
> it programmable in predictable ways?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Wednesday, November 3, 2021 8:20 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>
> Yeah, I agree. But context is Queen. When the virus is created in the lab,
> it's done with real stuff distilled from the soupy world. Given enough of a
> difference in context, the robot may not be able to re-constitute the life
> because the soupy world surrounding the robot doesn't have the real stuff
> required. Such drastic context changes could be a result of translation
> through space or time. E.g. trying to construct, on Mars, an organism
> read/serialized on earth. Or e.g. trying to construct an organism read
> millennia ago, millennia in the future. It's naive to talk about "science"
> as if any given read-out formula thereby expressed is *complete*. Science
> is abstraction to a large extent ... maybe not as abstracting as math, of
> course. And science must remain "open" precisely because any formula it
> expresses is suspect, perhaps incomplete.
>
> My favorite example is the magic brewing stick:
> https://medievalmeadandbeer.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/scandinavian-yeast-logs-yeast-rings/
>  It *was* scientific to lay out the magic stick as a critical element of
> the brewing process, only to discover later that the stick isn't the
> important part.
>
> On 11/2/21 2:39 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > Even if that were so, viruses have been pulled from history or tweaked
> and created in the lab.   So we have a design specification, and the means
> to make it.    One could imagine a robot fabricating the close-to-the-metal
> machine too.   There is a story one can write down how it is done.   If
> there is no story, it is not science we are talking about, it is something
> else.
>
>
> --
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
>
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