Calculating odds against hand ranges is too complex to be done by a human in real time while playing, even using calculators made for the purpose. Computers definitely have an advantage there. Assigning hand ranges in the first place is the trickier part for an AI, as it is more rooted in psychology.
This is a great way of putting it, your last part especially - assigning hand ranges is one of the things many players would probably attribute to gut or feel. Some implicit decision making ability that causes them to prune away vast parts of the possible tree and then make quick decisions on the remaining ones. Often based on knowing opponent history, observing patterns, etc.
Agreed. I would say one difference in poker is that strategy can be (and is, constantly) adapted over the life of a competition (and over the span of several competitions). Tempo, adjustments, stack and blind management/inflection points, even opponent avoidance in certain circumstances - I expect some of those to be things that humans may hold an edge to some degree. Those factor in a lot differently in other types of games (tournament play especially). I don't understand AI well enough to know what would be the hardest possible game for AI to conquer.
imagine a human player playing solo against a table full of optimally designed AI's that compute perfect statistical and economic odds based on a huge library of prior games including human games. What you are calling "advantages" for the human are no advantage at all. So now add a second human at that table, now the advantages you cite, they work only against that other player.
in terms of intial hand evaluation based on "gut", this is similar to chess position evaluation, a key part of master and computer play, a part that's been hard to get right, a part that brute force depth helps to get right, a part that is now completely solved for computers in play against humans. There is nothing particularly challenging about poker that stands in the way here.
It really isn't that hard in Texas Hold'em most of the time. You are usually only calculating for a few hands, and can memorize odds in advance (since while the combinations of cards is gigantic, the number of actual categories of combinations isn't that many)
That's wrong. Figuring out your true odds against multiple players who can hold an unevenly distributed range of hands requires a bayesian calculation that takes at minimum a few minutes for a human to perform, even using the best software tools for the purpose.
Strong players develop an intuition for this, making estimates on the spot, but they are frequently wrong and can't be very precise.
Just as the Naive Bayes algorithm is remarkably effective, a human approximation is often pretty good. Good enough that the strategy of the AI will be more important than its combinatorics.
