2015 three-player Kuhn competition - Call for Participation

[Kevin Waugh]

The Annual Computer Poker Competition will *not* be held again in 2015 due to AAAI permanently shifting ahead by 6 months.  As was discussed at the 2014 workshop, the organizers and many competitors felt that there would not be enough time to create substantially new agents.  The competition, in its standard form, will return in 2016 with an entry deadline sometime around December 2015.

In the interim, we will be holding a three player Kuhn poker bankroll competition for the 2015 workshop.  Despite the simplicity of the game, it is unsolvable.  That is, unlike in two-player zero-sum games, an agent playing its portion of a Nash equilibrium is not optimal and can be taken advantage of by two coordinated agents.  The intent of this contest is to provide a venue to investigate opponent modeling techniques that for statistical or computational reasons cannot be applied in three player Texas Hold’em.  

The barrier to entry is relatively low, and agents need not be as sophisticated as in the larger Hold’em games.  Some starter code can be found at https://github.com/kdub0/kuhn3p and last year’s entrants will be posted soon.  We hope that many of the past competitors will be able to contribute so as to have a fun and vibrant competition.

Entries will be allowed up to 10MB of uncompressed disk space.  Because the game is so small, entries will be allowed fairly minimal compute time: no more than 1 second per hundred hands, with the competition run on t1.micro (1 core 600MB RAM).  We ask that all competitors submit source code for their player.  That is, there will not be a hosted benchmark server.  If your agent relies on tables, or some other long running computation, you are not required to submit the code to generate this data.

Any individuals or teams that wish to participate will need to send an email by Jan 12 to ch...@computerpokercompetition.org expressing their interest.  The entries are due on Jan 16, 2015 and results will be announced at the AAAI Workshop on Computer Poker and Imperfect Information on Jan 26.  Your expression of interest email is not a formal commitment, but lets us plan for the time and resources required to run the competition.

Best,

Kevin