Poker

This is the seventh post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects. I mentioned that one of the goals of this project was to revive some of my older projects that tend to get neglected and stop working. So, I went through my GitHub and found an old Perl project that would be perfect to host again. Read on for my experience with migrating Perl projects to Kubernetes. The project I chose to migrate is gin-rummy-bot, a web-based Gin rummy game and an AI opponent. I became fascinated with Gin while learning poker after coming across the story of Stu Ungar. He had an eidetic memory and won the World Series of Poker main event a record three times. His last win incredibly came sixteen years after his previous win, a feat that will almost certainly never be replicated. But he was also known for being the best Gin rummy player, which he regarded as a more skillful game than Texas Hold’Em. ...

About a month ago I embarked on the project of writing a poker bot. It has all the things I enjoy about programming: it’s open-ended and can always be improved, it can be played against, and AI features heavily. There’s also a wealth of research on the topic: poker-ai.org and The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group are the two sites I use the most. I started by plugging in to Poker Academy, a game featuring strong AI opponents and a decent user interface. It allows you to hook in your own bots using their own Java-based API, called Meerkat. This was and still is a great tool to test with, but it has its drawbacks. You can only run one instance at once, it’s quite slow, and it has no networking capability. I wanted something I could use to demo the bot online. ...