The birth of AI poker? Letters from the 1984 WSOP

Summary

In 2007, a crafty computer poker research group at the University of Alberta showed off its Polaris poker bot, a project that had been over 16 years in the making. It was a complex program run on an Apple MacBook Pro, but it only played heads-up limit hold-em.Demonstrations against players like Phil Laak and Ali Eslami in the first Man vs. Machine Poker Championship in 2007 led to a big splash the following year at the Gaming Life Expo, where the computer played against six pro limit players in the second Man vs. Machine Poker Championship during the 2008 WSOP.But those were not the first and second times a pro poker player took on a sophisticated computer program, as 'Mad Genius of Poker' Mike Caro would 'angrily' point out in a Bluff Magazine column that year. In none of the stories about Polaris did Caro find a single mention of Orac, his Apple II Plus computer program that played against Doyle Brunson and Tom McEvoy on the eve of the 1984 WSOP Main Event.'Been there, done that'A scan of “hundreds of online reports” of the 2008 computer challenge touted that a machine was finally able to compete with humans. “Been there, done that,” Caro said.“You’ve heard about Orac, right?” Caro said at the start of his column. “Of course not! And if I don’t tell you about Orac, apparently nobody will.”The esteemed poker media of 2008 and beyond may have forgotten about Caro’s computer challenge, but it lives on in the Special Collections stacks at UNLV, where a thick folder of letters and planning materials sits in the Binion’s casino records collection. A 1984 letter from Apple Computer expresses interest in an upcoming demonstration at the WSOP. Caro, who was the editor of media outlets like Poker Player and Gambling Times, was already a well-established poker author and 'computer whiz' in 1984. Eager to test a poker program he had developed throughout the early eighties, he partnered with Binion’s Horseshoe to host the 1984 World’s First Computer Challenge during the 15th W...