Pokerbotic

This repository will be changing very soon to incorporate feedback from my CPPCon 2019 presentation, please check back in a couple of weeks

Pokerbotic is a poker engine. It has been developed by a professional software engineer and a semi-professional poker player with professional knowledge of stochastic processes little by little.

Currently, we have the hand evaluator framework, that achieves in normally available machines a rate of 100 million evaluations per second, that is, it classifies more than 100 million poker hands into what "four of a kind", etc. they are.

The code today assumes the AMD64 architecture, and support of the BMI2 instructions. AMD64/Intel is not essential to this code, just that the necessary adaptations have not been made. You are welcome to help with this.

Currently, the code is a header-only framework with some use cases programmed in C++ 14.

This code beats other poker engines, including the popular open source framework "PokerStove" both on ease of use and performance due to the application of Generic Programming.

Generic Programming allows hoisting what otherwise would be run-time computation to compilation time, this is illustrated in the non-trivial static_assert in the code itself.

The documentation for the advanced programming techniques, including the Floyd sampling algorithm, the SWAR techniques is being written.

How to build it

Prerequisites:

1. GCC compatible compiler. We recommend Clang 3.9 or 4.0 specifically. Benchmarks indicate Clang gives noticeably faster code. The code uses GCC extensions in the way of builtins.
2. C++ 14. In GCC or Clang, do not forget the option -std=c++14
3. Support for BMI2 instructions, activated with -march=native (preferred way) or specifically with -mbmi2
4. Test cases require the "Catch" testing framework.
5. Currently the code does not require a Unix/POSIX operating system (this code should be compilable in Windows64 through either gcc or clang), however, we reserve the option to make the code incompatible with any operating system.

There are several test programs available:

Unit tests at src/main.cpp

Several unit tests. This program illustrates how to use the engine framework. To build it, at the project root, you may do this:

clang++ -std=c++14 -Iinc -DTESTS -O3 -march=native -I../Catch/include src/main.cpp -o main

Notice you have to define TESTS and indicate the path to the "Catch" testing framework.

src/benchmarks.cpp

A program that measures the execution speed of several internal mechanisms. To build it, at the project root, you may do this:

clang++ -std=c++14 -Iinc -DBENCHMARKS -O3 -march=native src/benchmarks.cpp -o benchmarks

This program can be run without arguments. It will generate all 7-card hands and time the execution of all evaluations.

src/comparisonBenchmark.cpp

This program generates as in Texas Hold'em Poker, all possible 5-community cards, and proceeds to iterate over all two-player 2-card "pocket cards".

Because of the size of this search space, this program emits a current tally of execution every 100 million cases.

To build, for example:

clang++ -std=c++14 -Iinc -DHAND_COMPARISON -O3 -march=native -o cb src/comparisonBenchmark.cpp

Can be run without arguments.

Next feature to be implemented

Currently, multithreaded partitioning of evaluations is being implemented.

Documentation/User manual

Not yet written. Most of the code available under the folder ep/ is fully operational.