I started a new project a few days ago. It’s one I’ve been pondering over for a long time, and it’s about time I did something about it. I’m bad at naming projects, so I chose dPoker, the d is for donkey.  Donkeys are cool either in poker, on waffles, or on waffles on VT200s in Sysprog class. Basically, the core of the project is just a poker server. It’s purpose is for bots to play, compete, and learn, not really humans. Of course, humans will be able to play too, once somebody writes a client. I have a few friends interested in working on this too, but I need to get a proof of concept together first.

I set up a trac for it here.

Here’s a few technologies I’ll be using and design decisions (for the proof of concept at least) and why:

• The server will be written in Python.
  • it’s relatively fast and small in memory (compared to Ruby)
  • good libraries
  • readable
  • native thread support
  • I find it fun to write
• Probably using Twisted framework.
  • It seems nice and supports a variety of protocols.
  • Eventually want to make a javascript client
  • Don’t want to reinvent the wheel
• SQLAlchemy for data logging and account
  • I really like it
  • Sadly, there’s no recent updates to Asynchronous wrappers for for like a year, so I will probably have to roll my own :(.

I’ll be using a very simple protocol so people can easily write their own clients/bots in any language.  I’m trying to design it to scale well over multiple processes and servers.  It will also be modular so it can extend to different card games or non-card games.  The primary reason i want it to be scalable is because if computer learning is to be done, it has to either go really fast, or support hundreds of games at once.  There’s latency over the internet, so that would be the bottleneck for how fast a game finishes.  So my solution for networked games would be to have say maybe 10-100 instances of a bot running in that many different game rooms.  Although, there would still be latency, it would still increase the game’s played/time period.

Me or a friend will write a JS or even a flash client  so people can easily play over the internet against bots or each other.  I’d still have to work out a way to get people to try instead of going all-in all the time, but I think this would be important to add a bit of supervised learning to the mix and see how these bots evolve.