Abstraction followed by equilibrium finding has emerged as the leading approach to solving games. Lossless abstraction typically yields games that are still too large to solve, so lossy abstraction is needed. Unfortunately, prior lossy game abstraction algorithms have no guarantees on solution quality. We developed a framework that enables the design of lossy game abstraction algorithms with guarantees on solution quality. It simultaneously handles state and action abstraction. We define a measure of reward approximation error and transition probability error achieved by state and action abstraction in stochastic games such that the regret of the equilibrium found in the abstract game when implemented in the original, unabstracted game is upper-bounded by a function of those measures. We then develop the first lossy game abstraction algorithms with bounds on solution quality. Both of them work level-by-level up from the end of the game. One of the algorithms is greedy and the other is an integer linear program. We also prove that the abstraction problem is NP-complete (even with just action abstraction, 2 agents, and a 1-step game), but point out that this does not mean that the game abstraction problems that occur in practice cannot be solved quickly.

We present an overview of Tartanian5, a no-limit Texas Hold’em agent which we submitted to the 2012 Annual Computer Poker Competition. The agent plays a game-theoretic approximate Nash equilibrium strategy. First, it applies a potential-aware, perfect-recall, automated abstraction algorithm to group similar game states together and construct a smaller game that is strategically similar to the full game. In order to maintain a tractable number of possible betting sequences, it employs a discretized betting model, where only a small number of bet sizes are allowed at each game state. The strategies for both players are then computed using an improved version of Nesterov’s excessive gap technique specialized for poker. To mitigate the effect of overfitting, we employ an ex-post purification procedure to remove actions that are played with small probability. One final feature of our agent is a novel algorithm for interpreting bet sizes of the opponent that fall outside our model. We describe our new approach in detail, and present theoretical and empirical advantages over prior approaches. Finally, we briefly describe ongoing research in our group involving real-time computation and opponent exploitation, which will hopefully be incorporated into our agents in future years.