Neal - super interesting stuff. Couple of questions:
1) What were the reasons for choosing 6-handed play (assuming logistical and costs)? It would be interesting to see how the bot’s strategy would differ in a full ring game.
2) Are there any plans to commercialize the bot as a tool for training human players?
1) The goal was to show convincingly that we could handle multi-player poker. The exact number of players was kind of arbitrary. We chose six-player because that's the most common/popular format. Considering training the 6-player bot would cost less than $150 on a cloud computing service, I think it's safe to say these techniques would all work fine in other formats.
2) I'm quite happy working on fundamental AI research and plan to continue in that direction.
1) What were the reasons for choosing 6-handed play (assuming logistical and costs)? It would be interesting to see how the bot’s strategy would differ in a full ring game. 2) Are there any plans to commercialize the bot as a tool for training human players?