THE search is on to find a computer capable of beating the world’s top poker players — in other words, a machine that can lie and cheat with the best of them. Poker-playing robots, which are known as poker bots, will compete for the first World Series in Las Vegas next month, and a $100,000 (£54,850) prize, in an event that will run in tandem with its more established human equivalent.

The winners of each contest will then compete against each other to decide whether machine can really outbluff Man. The game will be no limit Texas hold ’em, which is considered to be the ultimate poker challenge.

The competition is being seen as a chance for software designers to devise poker’s own version of Deep Blue, the IBM computer that outwitted Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in 1997.

Darren Shuster, an entrepreneur and publicist from California who is staging the world series of Poker Robots, said: “Chess is a game of pure strategy. To play it well involves the absence of emotion. Poker is the opposite. It involves skill and strategy but it is also a game of chance.”

The problem facing programmers is to create a computer that is capable of cheating and lying, a technique that has so far eluded artificial intelligence experts.

Brian Edwards, one of the six poker robot designers playing in the World Series, has been working on his robot’s poker face for two years.

Mr Edwards said: “You have to teach the bot to understand that if he was someone else, what would he expect his card to be.

“Then from that range of possibilities he can choose one outcome that is different from the card he has. That is how a robot bluffs.”

Mr Edwards, 29, is confident that his poker bot will give the next human world champion a run for his money.

“With luck on his side he could probably beat any human for a few thousand hands.”

The emergence of poker-playing robots has caused alarm among online casinos, which have experienced a rapid growth in gambling over the internet.

One company, PartyGaming, is soon to float on the stock market with a value of about £4.7 billion only four years after it was founded.

Online casinos are concerned that some clients are using robots against unsuspecting opponents, and winning huge prizes. Mr Edwards claims to use his poker bot only for experimentation, and never for winning money on internet poker websites, where bots are banned.

Mr Edwards said: “People run bots on multiple computers to disguise themselves. Sometimes they will get caught. It’s a real underground thing, a cat and mouse game.”

Indeed, members of the poker robot community are suspicious of the World Series of Poker Robots because they fear that the source code behind their secretive programmes will be revealed, so allowing online casinos to build better defences against them.

Their suspicions appear well founded. Steve Baker, the chief executive of Cyberworld Group, which runs an online casino called Golden Palace, said: “We see this as an instructive opportunity. By sponsoring the event we hope to get to understand poker bots better.

“It is naive to pretend they do not exist. Perhaps the best guys in this field will end up working for us.”

Back in Florida, Mr Edwards has one eye on the prize and another on his children, aged eighteen months and two months.

He said: “Playing my bot against the best human in the world will be fun if I get there. But I am more concerned about the prize money. You can buy a lot of diapers with $100,000.”

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