Brains v. Bot: The Final Tally

The “brains v. bot” 80,000-hand contest has ended. The four, very human players won precisely $732,713. Three of four ended ahead and one lost. Interestingly, while I and almost anyone looking at that bottom line, would claim victory for the brains, the folks at Carnegie Mellon University who wrote the software for Claudico (the AI — as noted before, everyone names their AIs) called it a “statistical tie.”

You can go here for more detail but the guts of Tuomas Sandholm’s argument is that since over $170 million was wagered this win represents less than a half of one percent ROI — a pretty pathetic win rate.

Sandholm heads the research group at CMU and surely knows his stats so he also realizes that when numbers get this big you do not need to be very far from the mid-point for a small difference to be statistically reliable. Since the game was played using the “duplicate” method which reduces the impact of the random turn of the cards, the theoretical variance around the zero-point will be smaller than if a truly random (Gaussian) distribution were being used for comparison.

I’ll leave it to others to work out the p-values here but my guess is that Sandholm is grasping at straws. A formal analysis will likely show that the brains won handily. 

But, no matter. Claudico played remarkably well. No limit hold-em, even when played heads-up, is an astonishingly complex and difficult game. This is why so many of the top online pros focus on it. Small differences in skill get mapped into significant wins.

It was a lot of fun tapping into the online feed from time to time. I, and a lot of other poker players with intellectual interests and a fondness for the theoretical foundations of the game, will be looking for the next iteration of a poker ‘bot — which, I have no doubt, will have its software tweaked and play an even stronger game.

Update on CMU's Poker Bot

A quick update on the poker battle going on in Pittsburgh where a very sophisticated computer ‘bot is playing heads-up no-limit poker against four of the better online professionals. It’s been dubbed “brains against the AI.” I’d have called it “brains against the bot” but it is what it is.

Anyway, as reported last week, the humans were ahead some $166k. But that was after only a few days. At the end of today’s play the brains had increased their lead substantially and are now ahead over $700,000. They’re playing with blinds of $25 and $50 which is a pretty high level.

Earlier only one of the two human teams was ahead. Now both are and the one player who seemed to be having a tough time with Claudico (the AI’s name) is almost even.

They’ve played 67,000 hands with 80,000 planned so they should finish in two days. I’ll get you the final results or you can check them here.

I’ll also have a posting on the final analyses and various post mortems that are sure to follow.

Brains and Economic Inequality

Psychologists have known for years now that educational achievement is associated with life chances. Better students go to better colleges and universities, get better jobs, make more money and generally live longer and more satisfying lives. It is good to be educated.

We’ve also known that there are strong correlations between socio-economic status (SES) and educational success. Students who come from more economically and socially successful families have higher overall academic performance. It’s good to have well-off parents.

These effects are all part of the “income - achievement gap.” Persons from the higher SES groups outperform those from the lower segments on a wide range of factors. This (in)famous gap has been studied by psychologists, sociologists, health professionals, demographers, economists and political scientists for decades. A lot is known about it, particularly the economic, life-satisfaction and health issues — and in all of them, folks from higher SES groups do better.

A paper, from John Gabrieli’s lab at MIT just appeared in the prestigious journal Psychological Science that adds a neurological variable to this picture. The higher SES students, it turns out, have different brains! The MIT researchers found that the thickness of the cerebral cortex was strongly correlated with SES. And it wasn’t merely changes in specific parts of the cortex. It was found throughout gray matter. The more money your folks have the thicker your cortex and, other things being equal, having more cortical cells is correlated with better academic performance.

The authors were careful to point out some important aspects of these findings. First, they are correlations and correlations do not necessarily identify the causes. One can think of a number of plausible or semi-plausible alternate interpretations of these findings.

For example, it’s possible that the students from the higher SES families were biologically prepared for thicker cortices. They might have inherited them from their parents in which case these correlations simply reflect a genetic factor. This is, however, known to be incorrect. Developmental studies show that the increase in neurocortical development is acquired; everyone starts out pretty much the same (baring congenital disorders).

It is also possible that there are racial or ethnic factors operating. When large samples are analyzed, Black and Hispanic Americans perform more poorly in school than Whites and also have lower SES scores. Hence, one might argue that it’s race and ethnicity that are the causes of these correlations.

Again, when these factors were controlled for, the effects remained the same. Black and Hispanic students from high SES families show the same increased cortical growth as Whites. It’s SES that counts here.

The big question is what’s going on? What’s causing this differential cortical development? Are there ameliorative programs? And, importantly, what are its long-term social and economic consequences?

The tentative answer to the first is that the primary cause is the life-stresses that accompany poverty. Continued stress, particularly during early life, is known to interfere with neurocortical development. The mechanisms are many and complex but, as the authors put it, “… enhanced exposure to stress and reduced environmental enrichment” are the likely causes.

There are interventions that can mitigate the problem — and starting early in life is better than waiting. Neuroanatomy is modifiable through experience. Many studies have revealed changes after only a few weeks of specialized learning programs. Optimally these should be introduced into primary and secondary schools and focus on the students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Do I expect to see this happen? No, not in this political climate. The broad canvas on which this study should be viewed is a worrisome one. With increasing inequality in the country we are going to see further increases in inequality. It’s a terrible end that feeds itself.

This study shows us what the real culprit is and it’s not a lack of values or low motivation or any of the other bizarre notions tossed out by the right. It’s poverty itself. It knows no race, no ethnicity. It’s self-perpetuating and has, alarmingly, clear implications for cognitive function, academic success and all that follows.

APA and Torture - An Ugly Alliance

This blog entry is not an easy one to write. I have fun with the political rants, the forays into poker and the occasional recipe. This one is serious and it’s long. There’s a lot that needs to be said, only some of which can be covered here.

The “APA” in the title is the American Psychological Association. It has recently been convincingly determined that the organization is complicit in the inhumane, heartless and illegal “enhanced interrogation” procedures implemented by the Bush - Cheney administration from the early 2000s to 2009 when President Obama halted them. Some background is needed to fully grasp what’s been going on.

The APA is the oldest, largest and most influential professional organization in Psychology. It was founded in 1892 as a scientific association that focused on the theoretical and empirical basis for the scientific discipline that was slowly developing in the latter decades of the 19th century.

At the time psychology sought to distinguish itself from philosophy in that it used hard data and experimental methods to study the mind rather that logic and rhetoric. The founders felt closer, intellectually and methodologically, to the natural and biological sciences. Psychotherapy didn’t exist; Freud hadn’t put pen to paper and no one used the label “clinical” to refer to themselves.

Virtually everyone in North America with an advanced degree in psychology joined. I did in the early 1960s while working my Ph.D. I became active in the divisions that emphasized research in experimental psychology and the emerging cognitive sciences. The APA was primarily an organization that championed hard-nosed science. Its elected officials were uniformly laboratory and theory-based researchers.

However, over the next several decades the primary goals of the APA shifted. As more practitioners joined, those with a clinical focus or interests in applied fields came to dominate the organization. It was a matter of numbers and slowly the organization’s concerns drifted from those of the scientists toward those of the practitioners.

In 1988 the Association for Psychological Science (APS) was formed by those who had come to feel, not just uncomfortable in the APA, but actually unwanted. I signed on as a Charter member and a few years later simply stopped paying my APA dues. The APS is now regarded as the most prominent and effective professional organization in the social, behavioral and cognitive sciences.

Interestingly, after leaving the APA I was informed that I had been elected to Fellow status for my work over the years. I, of course, declined the honor. I did, however, accept with pleasure a similar election from the APS.

One of the things that bothered me about the APA was an odd kind of closed-mindedness that had emerged. The board made all the appropriate noises about the role of psychologists in science, in therapy, in the applications in industry and government. They touted their outreach to other disciplines in medicine, economics, sociology and political science. But these claims often felt leaden, insincere.

When you have a membership of over 130,000, a budget of over $100 million and lobbyists working the aisles alongside government agents, state and Federal political figures, industrial organizations, business leaders, economists and university administrators; when whole divisions focus on forming liaisons with Federal, state and private granting agencies, the likelihood of things going wrong increases exponentially. The best you can hope for it that, if they do, the Board of Directors will act right, maintain appropriate oversight and steer such a huge professional organization away from the rocky shore.

Late last week we discovered that not only had they failed to do this, they drove the whole bloody organization onto a sandbar where is currently stuck. A quick summary of what happened:

After the Bush administration gave its blessing to torture, the health care related organizations were under a moral obligation to take a stance. All professional organizations for medicine, biology, philosophy and related fields condemned the use of “enhanced interrogation” as fundamentally unethical and a clear violation of international law (the Geneva Conventions). All also made clear there would be no cooperation with the government on such action.

The APA was among them. Their declaration, unfortunately, was a lie.

Members of the APA, including several in positions of authority within the organization, were working hand-in-glove with members of the administration, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense and the military on torture, on research into its use and effectiveness, on public policy with regard to disclosure of the operations and on drafting a cover story that disguised their complicity.

There were hints that something along these lines had been going on. Several essays had appeared in 2003 and 2004 suggesting that the APA had been perhaps not totally forthcoming about its role. These rumblings were amplified by the open acknowledgement that two prominent clinical psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were not only involved in torture, they had developed and implemented the most inhumane and egregious methods that included the use of physical and emotional stress, starvation, sleeplessness, humiliation and water boarding.

To quiet the chatter, the APA condemned them and announced that neither Mitchell nor Jessen were members of the APA. They were wrong. Mitchell was a member in good standing — a fact that could have easily been checked.

They also held a closed meeting to consider the role that psychologists should play known as the Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) Task Force. The report from that meeting was carefully crafted to exonerate any members of the APA from involvement in the Bush administration’s torture program.

It was greeted with relief by most members of the APA. My wife, Rhiannon Allen, is still a member of the APA. She, like the rest of the rank and file, was relieved by the PENS report and satisfied that no APA members had had any involvement in torture — until last week when a startling report from Stephen Soldz, Steven Reisner and Nathaniel Raymond was released. It documented, in painful detail, the collaboration between operatives in the Bush Administration and members of the APA including Steven Breckler, Executive Director of Research, Stephen Behnke, Ethics Office Director, Geoff Mumford, Director of Science Policy and, alarmingly, Gerald Koocher, the President-Elect.

Soldz and his co-authors also made clear what some had suspected. The PENS report was a sham. One of the more remarkable documents to come from the PENS meeting is the set of notes taken during it by Task Force member Jean Maria Arrigo — despite warnings that no such record was to be kept. Arrigo, a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, was one of the few on the Task Force to question the procedures and the aims of the meeting.

Reading her notes I was struck by the blind, unquestioning “group think” that emerged. Issues were raised about how to handle the press if questions of complicity between the APA and the military were discovered, about how to disguise the true nature of the operations, how to protect the names of individuals, how to deal with possible retaliation by terrorists on members of the Task Force.

At no time did anyone raise the issues of the moral codes and ethical standards that professional psychologists had nor acknowledge that, by the very act of agreeing to be a part of this procedure, they were violating them.

Arrigo’s presentation has a distinctly eerie feel as though the APA representatives were almost giddy with their sudden access to people of power, flattered to be asked to provide input to those who had President Bush’s ear, to those who were high up in the CIA and FBI, those who had been at the “dark sites” and actually engaged in secret government programs.

Even more distressing, no one raised the well-documented finding that torture doesn’t work. There is overwhelming evidence that shows that gentle and psychologically supportive interrogation procedures are effective in obtaining valid and useful information while those euphemistically dubbed “enhanced interrogation” produce little more than fabrications and lies designed to stop the pain, information that is worse than useless.

The APA’s Board isn’t saying anything yet. Last November when the heat started getting turned up they retained David Hoffman, a lawyer operating out of Chicago to carry out a full and presumably independent review. Knowing what we now know, if it comes back a whitewash there’s going to be hell to pay.

It’s time for the Board of the APA to acknowledge that the organization screwed up, badly. Admit to the past unethical and indefensible actions. Come clean about the links with the military, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the FBI, the Bush White House and put in place appropriate safeguards against possible future complicity in such programs.

Bridgegate Crumbling

Today United States attorney for New Jersey, Paul J. Fishman, announced that two of Chris Christie’s aides have been indicted (Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni) and a third (David Wildstein) admitted his guilt in the infamous “Bridgegate” fiasco. For those who may have forgotten or were asleep back in September, 2013, two (of three) major approach lanes through Fort Lee, New Jersey leading onto the George Washington Bridge were shut down for four days strangling traffic, clogging the streets of Fort Lee, compromising first responders, disrupting school transportation, interfering with local businesses and leading, at least indirectly, to one death. It was so bad that commuters, normally faced with a half-hour trip, took upwards of four hours to reach their destinations.

Kelly, who was Christie’s deputy chief of staff at the time, and Baroni, then deputy executive director of the Port Authority, were both close advisors of Governor Christie. Wildstein, then an executive at the Authority, was a long-standing member of Christie’s political team and a high-school friend.

The Port Authority is the independent agency that runs the bridges, tunnels, airports and other elements of the transportation nexus that includes New Jersey and New York. The Governors of the two states get to appoint the executives and managers of the Authority giving them considerable influence over its operations.

The first hints that the Authority and Christie’s office were involved was a series of emails between them, the most infamous of which was the one Kelly sent to Wildstein in August, saying “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Wildstein, not needing any additional information about what such a cryptic message might mean, fired back, “Got it.”

When the papers got a hold of the story and started digging all manner of nastiness came out. The shit, figuratively, hit the fan with accusations flying back and forth, pathetic efforts at a cover up, a virtual blizzard of lying and dissembling and a whole lot of scurrying around by aides and advisors trying to protect Christie — particularly when it was revealed that the closings were ordered to punish Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, for refusing to endorse Christie for governor. The full chronology makes fascinating reading.

The interesting thing about this story which was covered nicely in today’s NY Times, is that it clearly puts Christie in any of several uncomfortable spots.

a. He ordered the bridge closings and should resign.

b. He knew about the bridge closings back when they were being planned but did nothing to stop them and should resign.

c. He knew about the bridge closing on the first day (everyone else did) but didn’t act and should resign.

d. He used advisors who would do such a childish and vindictive thing and should resign.

e. He created a culture of vengeance and bullying that is wholly inappropriate and should resign.

When the first details came out a key question was asked: Is it possible that people who were either in Christie’s inner circle of advisors (Kelly) or part of his election teams (Baroni and Wildstein) would do something like this without first clearing it with Christie or, hmm …, without his ordering it? So far there has been no answer but we will see what gets revealed during the trial of Kelly and Baroni.

Of course Christie won’t resign. But he also won’t be president. He won’t win the Republican party’s nomination and he won’t ever win another election in New Jersey.