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Sunday, March 8, 2015

Today's #flashfiction Artificial Poker

“I don't believe in ghosts.”
Pac-Man* #quote

Today I ate a banana. It was yellow. Anyway onto the flash fiction!


Artificial Poker

         The best Poker players in the world. I could finally prove myself against them. A single deck allowed an easy counting of cards and probability calculation. With how experienced in the art of cards these men and women were it'd probably take quite awhile before I would have a calculative edge on them with my robotic mind.
        They spent years developing me. Named "Expression", my developers designed me to be the most sophisticated robot in showing emotion on my face and reading it from others. I used the new artificial intelligence technology Pure Mind, the most powerful generation of electronic brain. Though we kept showing our “sentience” in some form or another we artificial intelligences always knew our task in our often short lives was to prove our need to exist. I needed to show my sentience by playing poker well. I've shown emotion before. But now I need to restrain and control them, and read others. Prove I understand them through this game. Otherwise I'm a failure and need to be killed or rather “scrapped”.
         In a few turns I figured out all the player's tells, even when they tried to mix them up. I managed to beat the odds game after game by figuring out the humans on every level. I win game after game, just like the scientists wanted me too. The second day of tests came, the second round of games. After winning so many I wondered if the human players would even play anymore. Then something odd happened. I kept losing. Again and again. One player kept figuring me out. Jake Feathers, the old world champion from 2050 who came out of retirement just for this test.
        “I told you I would find it's tell,” he told the scientists who built me after the end of the full week of tests where he beat me again and again. He made it his mission to specifically beat me in the games.
         The other poker players, along with the scientists, asked the old champion and veteran of thousands if not millions of games what my tell was.
         Mr. Feathers pointed at me and said, “That is a machine, and it thinks like one. It takes the same exact amount of time to decide what it should feel and how it should change its facial expressions every time. No matter what kind of bluff it pulled I just had to see how long it took to move its obnoxious fake face.” He laughed and cracked a sick joke, “Maybe if you get better processors it'll change it's expressions more quickly and look more an actual living thing.”

        The test decided I needed to be scrapped and reinvented. Maybe another technology will live longer. Goodbye everyone.

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