Pokerbots Competition cancelled this IAP
The popular Pokerbots Competition (6.176) will not be offered this IAP.
This six unit undergraduate class allowed teams of up to four students to build autonomous poker players and concluded with a final competition and prizes of over $25,000 from technology and finance firms. Lectures covered programming, game theory, bankroll management, probability and statistics, and machine learning.
The class was cancelled “due to some scheduling issues,” Nilai Sarda ’20, one of the instructors for the class, wrote in an email to The Tech. “Every year, we have to create a new version of poker and code an engine for it; we decided to take this year off to restructure our internal code to create a better competition in the future.”
“We also have plans to scale pokerbots outside of the MIT community, and one of our major projects over the course of the next year will be to set up the infrastructure to make that possible,” Sarda continued.
Pokerbots Competition was started in 2011. Sarda wrote, “The spirit of the class was to have people enjoy learning a new variant of poker and examining it from a computational and game theoretic lens. The class will be offered after a one year hiatus next IAP.”