Computer poker class

Abe's post on what material he thought should be taught in undergrad AI motivated me to post some of my ideas about classes. In this post, I'll talk about a new course I'd like to design if I become a professor.

The class would be called "Computer Poker," and basically introduce a lot of concepts from game theory, AI, and related areas using poker as a motivating problem. I recall discussing the possibility of such a course with Mike Bowling at a conference a few years ago, and he said something along the lines of "nearly every section from Russel/Norvig's classic AI textbook has shown up in the course of poker research in the last few years." Not that I really need to defend poker research to the people reading this blog, but the following two links present some good summaries of its contributions: Annual Computer Competition website and AAAI Computer Poker Competition description. Here's a nice summary quote from the AAAI link: "In recent years, poker has emerged as an important, visible challenge problem for the field of AI."

Unlike most courses which present lots of different topics without really tying them all together or going into much depth in any particular topic, this course would present relatively fewer topics, but would tie them all back to the motivating problem of creating a strong poker program. I think a course like this could be really popular, since most people enjoy playing poker (or similar games) and would be naturally motivated already.

I guess the class would be designed at 3rd or 4th-year undergrads who had already taken some math and programming courses. I think it would need to end with a final project that was some sort of competition in which everyone submitted a full poker bot for some variant of poker. But this would be kind of tricky, because on the one hand it takes months (or even years) to develop strong Texas Hold'em bots, but if we picked a variant that was too small, it could probably be solved exactly making the problem not very interesting (although if people expected some entrants wouldn't play an equilibrium, they might not want to either, which might make it interesting). One reasonable idea might be to use a simplified 3-player game, so that even if an equilibrium could be computed, it might not necessarily be a good idea to play it. Maybe we could even give away an equilibrium in advance, so everyone is on the same page.

This idea is obviously still in very early stages, but I think it has potential ...