On novelty driven evolution in Poker
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work asks the question as to whether `novelty as an objective' is still beneficial under tasks with a lot of ambiguity, such as Poker. Specifically, Poker represents a task in which there is partial information (public and private cards) and stochastic changes in state (what card will be dealt next). In addition, bluffing plays a fundamental role in successful strategies for playing the game. On the face of it, it appears that multiple sources of variation already exist, making the additional provision of novelty as an objective unwarranted. Indeed, most previous work in which agent strategies are evolved with novelty appearing as an explicit objective are not rich in sources of ambiguity. Conversely, the task of learning strategies for playing Poker, even under the 2-player case of heads-up Limit Texas Hold'em, is widely considered to be particularly challenging on account of the multiple sources of uncertainty. We benchmark a form of genetic programming, both with and without (task independent) novelty objectives. It is clear that pursuing behavioural diversity, even under the heads-up Limit Texas Hold'em task is central to learning successful strategies. Benchmarking against static and Bayesian opponents illustrates the capability of the resulting Genetic Programming (GP) agents to bluff and vary their style of play.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".