There is a tendency in decision-making research to treat uncertainty only as a problem to be overcome. But it is also a feature that can be leveraged, particularly in social interaction. Comparing the behavior of profitable and unprofitable poker players, we reveal a strategic use of information processing that keeps decision makers unpredictable. To win at poker, a player must exploit public signals from others. But using public inputs makes it easier for an observer to reconstruct that player's strategy and predict his or her behavior. How should players trade off between exploiting profitable opportunities and remaining unexploitable themselves? Using a recent multivariate approach to information theoretic data analysis and 1.75 million hands of online two-player No-Limit Texas Hold'em, we find that the important difference between winning and losing players is not in the amount of information they process, but how they process it. In particular, winning players are better at integrative information processing-creating new information from the interaction between their cards and their opponents' signals. We argue that integrative information processing does not just produce better decisions, it makes decision-making harder for others to reverse engineer, as an expert poker player's cards act like the private key in public-key cryptography. Poker players encrypt their reasoning with the way they process information. The encryption function of integrative information processing makes it possible for players to exploit others while remaining unexploitable. By recognizing the act of information processing as a strategic behavior in its own right, we offer a detailed account of how experts use endemic uncertainty to conceal their intentions in high-stakes competitive environments, and we highlight new opportunities between cognitive science, information theory, and game theory.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12632 | DOI Listing |
Sci Rep
January 2025
Mathematics, Shahed University, 3319118651, Tehran, Iran.
The resolution of extensive-form zero-sum games is a fundamental challenge in computational game theory, addressed through various algorithms, each with unique strengths and limitations. This paper presents a comprehensive comparison of leading algorithms, using Poker-like games as benchmarks to assess their performance. For each algorithm, optimal parameters were identified, and evaluations were conducted based on exploitability, average utility, iterations per second, convergence speed, and scalability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFData Brief
December 2024
Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Skudai, Johor Bahru, Malaysia.
The dataset presents raw data on the egocentric (first-person view) and exocentric (third-person view) perspectives, including 47166 frame images. Egocentric and exocentric frame images are recorded from original iPhone videos simultaneously. The egocentric view captures the details of proximity hand gestures and attentiveness of the iPhone wearer, while the exocentric view captures the hand gestures in the top-down view of all participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Behav Addict
October 2024
1Université de Franche Comté, UMR INSERM 1322 LINC, F-25000, Besançon, France.
Background And Aims: Gambling activity evolves along a continuum from recreational to Gambling Disorder (GD) and a particular challenge is to identify whether there are some neurophysiological particularities already present in gamblers at an early stage. Our main goal was to determine whether, in the gamblers' population, neural responses generated during uncertain decisions were different depending on problematic gambling risk defined by the Canadian Problem Gambling Index (CPGI). We tested the following hypothesis, that the Problem Gambling group would show a different brain activity related to outcomes processing than people with low risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAddict Biol
February 2024
UMR INSERM 1322LINC, Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France.
Online poker gambling (OPG) involves various executive control processes and emotion regulation. In this context, we hypothesized that online poker players, accustomed to handling virtual cards, would show high performance on computerized decision-making tasks such as the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Using press advertisements, we recruited a non-gambler group (NG; n = 20) and an OPG group (n = 22).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Gambl Stud
September 2024
Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Wuppertal, Gaußstr. 20, 42119, Wuppertal, Germany.
The study addresses the question whether professional gamblers can be considered an occupational group from a sociological perspective. It combines survey data on poker players from the German state North Rhine-Westphalia with sociological theory in order to explain the oxymoron of professional gambling. The descriptive analysis of the survey data is supplemented by ego-centric network data of the poker players to analyze whether hobby and professional players maintain different forms of social relationships.
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