viva, las vegas

I haven't posted much lately 'cuz words scare me. Here are some pictures instead (somewhat poor quality because i set my crackberry to low-res).

The CPRG took our poker program, Polaris, to Las Vegas, to battle against some very good players, including the best heads-up Limit Hold'em player in the world, Matt "Hoss_TBF" Hawrilenko.

And we won! (enter "Polaris poker" into Google news, or go to http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine for more info). The program held its own against Matt, and beat some of the others very convincingly. Based on the post-match analysis, it might even be claimed that Hoss is no longer Boss.

It's been a long road (16 years!), with lots of kudos along the way, but we've finally accomplished a major milestone. I believe this was a defining before/after event in the history of poker. The unbelievers won't believe it yet, but then the gap between perception and reality has always been very wide in the poker world.


[and now this buggy blogging software won't let me add the photos... more later]