Pared-down Poker: Cutting to the Core of Command and Control

Poker poses cognitive challenges like those of warfare, business and other real world domains. This makes poker a good test bed for basic research on how people make Command and Control decisions and for applied research on how systems might help people make better decisions. In this paper, I compare the cognitive challenges of poker and warfare, and present a new suite of “Pared-down Poker” games that cut to the core of Command and Control. Compared to full-scale poker, Pared-down Poker is more tractable to normative analyses in the lab and more relevant to cognitive challenges in the world. The games have been programmed in Java along with various “animal archetypes” that simulate poker personalities. One game has been used to study the computational effectiveness of cognitive style against normative skill, and the findings from this study highlight questions for further research.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CIG
• Authors: Kevin Burns
• Keywords: CIG 2005, Cognitive Challenges, Pared-down Poker, Poker