Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (21 page)

“Now, why in the world—?”

“Because it is a game that some humans play, but not all. A game that few cybers play, and those that do—by all published accounts—play badly. I want to become a machine that people can value.”

“And do you think you can learn to play poker well, where other algorithm-based cybers have failed?”

“I will learn to play well, or let ME be dismantled.”

“In which case I’ll probably lose my hundred bucks.”

“I will not fail you, Doctor.”

17
Blind Man’s Bluff

The first poker ever I played was a scratch game over the lunch hour with a group of techs in the Hardware Division—the same people who had put together my automaton for the return trip from Canada.

In order for ME to play in their game, they had to make some mechanical adjustments. [REM: They said they were doing this as a covert technical exercise—a blind experiment. I later found out that the time and materials they expended were charged to the MEPSII project, over Dr. Bathespeake’s signature.]

First, the technicians rigged a pair of spare manipulators on a T-frame at the edge of their playing surface. These were Pinocchio, Inc.’s latest, patented Multi-Grips™, with six independently opposable pincer sets fanned across a flexible arc of pseudocarpals. With their driver program downloaded, I was instantly able to pick up an individual playing card that was lying flat on the tabletop.

I did this by applying closure pressure against opposite corners of the back until the face lifted from the surface enough for ME to put a third finger under it. With a little practice, I could pick up any card in such a way that no one standing in front of ME would see the face.

One of the techs, Harry Gutierrez, hung a sleeveless human garment from the crossbar of my manipulator T-frame. He called it a “vest” and instructed ME to hold my spread hand close to the cloth surface. Though I followed his advice exactly, I never discovered the significance of this action.

Another of the techs, Wendell Minks, promised to write a program that would let ME deal the cards with the Multi-Grips™.

“Yeah,” said Gutierrez, “and with those six fingers he’ll be able to deal from the top, middle, and bottom—all at the same time.”

This brought the sound of “ha-ha-ha” aspirated laughter from the others who were preparing to play.

In order for ME to hear their bids and make my own calls and raises, they ran a boosted optic fiber from my home system’s VOX: and AUR: devices. These let ME also hear the verbal byplay which is the larger social context of a poker game and contributes to evaluation of the opposing players’ strengths and weaknesses.

So that I could see my cards, count chips on the table, and watch the players’ facial expressions [REM: gauging the “poker face” which the literature of game theory so frequently describes], they hooked up a monocular videye in their own laboratory, linked again by optic fiber with a digital booster to my home system.

Then, curiously, these players entered into an elaborate hunt to find and shut off all the other videyes in their laboratory. For any units they could not safely depower, they took several minutes out of their available playing time to install a block and scramble on the leads. When I asked Wendell Minks about this, he said: “That’s so you’ll only have one pair of eyes to play with.” [REM: My new VID: device, however, was an un-depthed monocle.]

They also generally examined the room where we played for shiny surfaces that might cast a reflection, and either blanked them or turned them at right angles to the playing area.

So much strange behavior to put into a game! Humans clearly take this “hobby” activity very seriously.

My library references had taught ME that, with a deck of 52 cards of which none have been declared “wild,” there are exactly 2,598,960 possible combinations in a poker “hand” of five cards. I memorized these combinations.

Analyzing them, I saw that statistically far fewer than the possible 2.59E06 hands had value according to the rules of poker. I created tables grouping them in order of ascending probability:

Royal flush
—all five cards of the same suit, with their face values falling in the order Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and Ten.

Straight flush
—identical to a royal, but not Ace high.

Four-of-kind—
all the deck’s cards which are of one face value gathered into one hand.

Full house
—three matched cards of one value and two matched cards of another.

Flush
—five cards all of one suit but in no particular order of value.

Straight—
all five cards in order of face value, but of no particular suit.

Three-of-kind
—three-fifths of a full house.

Two pair
—four-fifths of a full house, but with two card values represented; also, the same as a symmetrically broken four-of-kind.

One pair
—two-fifths of a full house, and the lowest possible hand in poker.

[REM: I did once hear Wayne Phuang declare “Paregoric!” as openers just before he folded with a disgusted look on his face. But why he would open the hand and then fold immediately—and what a “camphorated tincture of opium, used especially to relieve pain” might have to do with poker—I never did establish.]

Of course, hands that are statistically improbable are more highly valued than those which may more commonly turn up.

In the lower-valued hands, all the five cards dealt may not contribute to a grouping of interest. In that case, any cards which do not fit may be ignored or discarded. [REM: Strategies for discarding misfits and drawing new cards are part of the multi-valued nature of the game, which make poker more suited to the decision-making capability of humans than to simple cybers.]

If no valuable grouping is discovered, the player may discard and redraw the whole hand, or may elect to cease play entirely for that turn. This latter strategy is called “folding” and—contrary to inductive logic—may represent a winning move in the long-term scheme of the game.

Before I could play, the others also had to give ME some numerical counters. Harry Gutierrez, who represented himself as “the banker,” got a box that was filled both with variously colored disks of inert plastic and with the metal disks and paper leaves that are called “money.” [REM: A place to keep money and moneylike counters was, by definition, a “bank.”]

He explained that they were making a big exception in taking a “personal check” from Dr. Bathespeake in exchange for giving ME a pile of colored disks. Gutierrez held this “check” up before my active videye and solemnly said that he “held my marker.” The exact ritual significance of these activities escaped ME.

Gutierrez then counted out the “chips” with which I would play—four blue ones, worth $10 each; eight red ones, worth $5; and twenty white ones, worth $1. This distribution of values, he said, would parallel the scale of the betting.

To select the first dealer, the seven of us all “cut the cards.” That is, Gutierrez put the full deck on the playing surface and each in turn pulled off its upper half, taking a random number of cards with it. The bottom card on this short stack that the person pulled up was “his/my card.” And the person whose card showed the highest face value and suit became the dealer.

After everyone had cut the deck, it was my turn. I reached out with my manipulator and took a grip on opposite sides of the stack with my rubber-padded fingertips. By recording my count of the layers caught in the light across the edge of the deck, I already knew the exact positions of the six cards previously revealed. Of course, my goal was not to select one of them; instead, I had to find a card higher than King of Clubs.

Higher than King is the Ace. Hypothesis: in an imperfectly shuffled deck, especially one as new as these cards seemed to be, the Ace of Clubs has a very slight probability of falling as the card immediately above the King’s position. So best probability dictated a cut for that adjacent card.

I squeezed the deck slightly, bowing the backs of the cards above my selected position, and worked the tip of my third finger into the gap. With an elevation of my hydraulic arm and a twist of my wrist, I revealed the Ace.

But it was the Ace of Spades, not of Clubs. So much for probabilities.

“Hey, no fair!” Calvin Yee immediately called.

“What do you mean? He won the cut, didn’t he?” Minks replied.

“Yeah, but he counted cards or something.”

“No way!”

This began a minor and uninformed dispute over whether card counting was legal—or even possible—in a cut.

The result was that, “just to keep everyone happy,” I would not take the first deal. That kept ME happy, too, because I was far from certain about the dexterity of my new manipulators.

The deal passed to Wayne Phuang, who had cut the King of Clubs.

“The game, gentlemen and lady and—unh—
machine”
he began in formal cadences, “is five-card draw with nothing wild—”

“Except the dealer!” from Joanne Talbot.

“—and Jacks or better to open,” Phuang finished smoothly.

“He means a
pair of Jacks,
ME,” Minks explained.

“I understand.”

“Let’s give it a name, please!” Gutierrez said.

“What do you mean?” from Minks.

“Well, we can’t keep calling it ‘ME,’ because that gets confusing when somebody might mean ‘I.’ And we can’t call it ‘the machine’; that kind of gives me the creeps. So let’s give it a proper poker-playing moniker.”

“With that claw, how about Six Finger Slim?”

“Yeah! He sure looks like a ‘Slim,’ ” said Talbot, poking a long fingernail into the flattened vest that was hanging off my T-frame.

So, among this company of poker players, ME became variously known as “Slim,” “Six Fingers,” and just “Fingers.” I try to adapt.

While this went on, Phuang smoothly dealt the cards. Five to each player in order. Thirty-five gone from the deck. Seventeen possible redraws left in the deck.

“Hey! What’s the ante?” from Talbot.

“Shoot! I forgot all about it. Playing with a machine has messed up my mind,” Phuang replied.

“Not that hard to do, kid,” from Gutierrez. “Who’s already picked up? Joanne. Robin. Okay, everybody, toss ’em back. New dealer!”

The deal passed to Gutierrez.

“Ante a nickel,” he said. “Same game.”

Everyone put a $5 red chip in the center of the table. [REM: Was “nickel” a slang term for this amount of bet? Comparison of vocal cues and subsequent actions suggested this as a working hypothesis.]

Matching their actions, I took a two-finger grip on the top chip in my red stack, lifted it two centimeters, and rammed the arm forward at its maximum rate of 400 centimeters per second. I released the grip after ten centimeters of travel. The chip sailed a short arc into the top of the pile on the table—and loose chips exploded all over and off onto the floor.

Gutierrez and the others glared at ME [REM: or, at my collection of immobile hardware: videye, voicebox, T-frame, and manipulators]. Joanne Talbot reached out and began picking up the scattered chips, tossing most of them back into the pot but sorting those that seem to have fallen from any individual players’ piles back to their owners. Calvin Yee bent to retrieve those that had gone under the table.

“Nice work, Slim,” Talbot said dully.

“This time we pick them up,” Gutierrez warned. “Next time, you gotta figure it out yourself.”

I recalibrated my arm for a delivery speed of forty centimeters per second.

In the meantime, Gutierrez had shuffled the cards that were recollected from the earlier broken hand, shuffled them again, and offered them flat on the table to Phuang. The latter tapped them once with his center finger. And Gutierrez picked the deck up to deal. More rituals, evidently.

When all five cards were before ME on the playing surface, I tried to pick them up. First, I used the edges of my pads to push them into a square stack. Second, I pinched the edges to bow the stack away from the tabletop. Third, I lifted the hand, which caused the brand-new manipulator mechanism to squeeze tighter as it moved—and the cards slipped, spraying all over my end of the table. Three fell face up: Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Hearts, and King of Clubs. Two fell face-down.

“Cards showing, Harry!” from Minks.

“Shit! Another dead hand! This is getting downright laughable. Look, Slim, can’t you just play that hand?”

“I will play,” I said apologetically.

Working more slowly, I arranged each card individually, picked it up, and placed it fanwise in one of the pincer sets of the opposite hand. The whole process took about four seconds. After I had built up a library of card sorts and movement subroutines with those manipulators, I would probably get that time down to about half a second—depending on the wear and heat tolerances of a fiber-base, plastic-coated playing card.

My other two cards were Jack of Clubs and King of Diamonds.

“Open for a two,” Talbot said, from Gutierrez’s right. She tossed in a pair of white chips.

“I’ll stay for that,” from Minks. Two more $1 chips.

Calvin Yee and Robin Hong bet the same silently, and the turn came around to ME.

What to do? With a Jacks-over-Kings full house, I had one of the four best possible combinations. Statistical probabilities said that no other hand at the table could beat it. However, I could raise the bet and draw out more of their money before taking it away.

But everyone had seen that I already held a pair of Jacks. When I failed to discard and draw to this hand, they would know, after my aggressive betting, that it must be either a one or two pair, three-of-kind—or some hand higher than a flush. This knowledge would spoil their enthusiasm for continued betting.

I put in two white chips and kept quiet.

Phuang and Gutierrez also “saw” Talbot’s opening bid with their own white chips.

“Cards?” Gutierrez asked Talbot.

“Two,” she said, tossing her discards toward him.

He dealt her two new cards.

And the pattern repeated around the table, some taking one card, others two or three. Clearly, no one had held a “pat” hand, indicating that none of the original cards could beat mine. Unless, of course, their draws had
created
new or improved combinations, and the odds of that were, paradoxically, equal to those on the original deal.

“Cards, Slim?” Gutierrez asked ME.

What to do? With a full house, I should stand pat. But I would only reveal my position of superiority by refusing to discard. On the other hand, I could safely maintain my strategic “poker face” by drawing at least one new card. And the chances of improving my hand with that card were exactly equal to the chances on the original deal. Except that the original hand dealt to ME was a statistically improbable full house. So I should stand pat. But I would only reveal my position of superiority by refusing to discard. On the other—