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<article-title>Better Automated Abstraction Techniques for Imperfect Information Games,<br/> with Application to Texas Hold'em Poker</article-title>
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<author><a href="mailto:gilpin@cs.cmu.edu"><name>Andrew Gilpin</name></a></author>
<aff>Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:sandholm@cs.cmu.edu"><name>Tuomas Sandholm</name></a></author>
<aff>Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA</aff>

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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>We present new approximation methods for computing gametheoretic
strategies for sequential games of imperfect information.
At a high level, we contribute two new ideas. First,
we introduce a new state-space abstraction algorithm. In
each round of the game, there is a limit to the number of
strategically different situations that an equilibrium-finding
algorithm can handle. Given this constraint, we use clustering
to discover similar positions, and we compute the
abstraction via an integer program that minimizes the expected
error at each stage of the game. Second, we present
a method for computing the leaf payoffs for a truncated version
of the game by simulating the actions in the remaining
portion of the game. This allows the equilibrium-finding
algorithm to take into account the entire game tree while
having to explicitly solve only a truncated version. Experiments
show that each of our two new techniques improves
performance dramatically in Texas Hold'em poker.
The techniques lead to a drastic improvement over prior approaches
for automatically generating agents, and our agent
plays competitively even against the best agents overall.</p>
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