Research Of Opponent Modeling In Texas Holdem

With the development of Artificial Intelligence, most games with perfectinformation can be solved with effective game tree search technology, but imperfectinformation games have been ignored for a long time. The emergence of newmethods in the area of Artificial Intelligence and the improvement of computerhardware make it possible to deal with imperfect information problems.Unlike players in perfect information games, participants in imperfectinformation games can only observe partial information of the whole game. At thesame time, we have to deal with stochastic results, risk management, opponentmodeling, deception, and unreliable information when facing imperfect information.The process to deal with imperfect information game is much like thedecision-making application in the real world, the research on imperfect informationgame will contribute to competition in the real world. Opponent modeling is one ofthe most challenging aspects in imperfect information games, it is also an importantcomponent for a good imperfect information game program. A good opponent modelwill describe how the opponent act in the game, and from the information we canpredict the unknown information and what the player will do in the future.Combining the results of opponent modeling with the technology of game treesearch for imperfect information game will help us make the most beneficialdecision in games.In this paper we will introduce how to model the opponent in imperfectinformation games, and how to use opponent modeling algorithms to classifyplayers and predict unknown information in games. We chosen Texas Holdem as anexperimental platform, by using opponent modeling algorithms and hand evaluationmethods we built a poker program which participated in the2013Annual ComputerPoker Competition held by AAAI, finally we took eighth place in heads-up limitTexas Holdem and took fourth place in3-player limit Texas Holdem, this validatedthe effectiveness of opponent modeling algorithms in imperfect information games.Another work in this paper is the improvement in hand evaluator for Texas Holdem,an effective hand evaluator is an important component of a strong Texas Holdemprogram, it is also the foundation of the opponent modeling algorithm for TexasHoldem.