At Pittsburgh International Airport, poker has become part of the equation that makes it safer to fly. The Post-Gazette reports that a group of computer scientists is applying game theory to the postmodern dilemma of arranging and enforcing security checkpoints in a busy transportation hub. The idea had its genesis six years ago, when Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University teamed up with Andrew Gilpin, then a doctoral student, to come up with an ominous-sounding "lossless abstraction algorithm" for poker.
"It just seemed like an interesting problem to work on," said Dr. Gilpin. "And at the time, poker was getting really popular and I had just started playing with my friends on my own."
In 2005, the duo became the first to create a computer program that was, for all intents and purposes, unbeatable when it came to Rhode Island Hold 'Em poker, a relatively simple 3-card variant variant of the game with about 3.1 blllion possible scenarios to account for in the algorithms. Texas Hold 'Em is widely considered unsolvable for mathematicians because of the number of possible situations that each hand features, but that doesn't stop scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Alberta from hosting the Annual Computer Poker Competition.
Their work, in conjunction with research that Dr. Sandholm had provided for another doctoral student, Vincent Conitzer, in the field of player strategy caught the eye of Milind Tambe, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. Tambe was working on a project to improve security at LAX by creating efficient, randomized security patterns and applied the Carnegie Mellon researchers' findings to their ongoing work.
Dr. Tambe developed a project called ARMOR (Assistance for Randomized Monitoring of Routes) and put it to work at LAX in 2007. ARMOR was so effective that the Transportation Security Administration asked him to develop a version for other airports, which lead to GUARDS (Game-theoretic Unpredictible And Randomly Deployed Security,) which TSA began pilot-testing at Pittsburg International Airport las fall.
"We try to be random, but there's a tendency for people to diminish randomness because of what they know intuitively," said Joe Terrell, TSA's federal security director for the region. "When something's predictable and people can see what's happening it makes it useful for them to do something to you."
The math may be difficult to understand, but Terrell and his cohorts state that the effectiveness of the methodology is proven and they're looking forward to a national rollout in the near future.
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