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Technology

AI learns to gamble illogically like humans to predict our behaviour

By Edd Gent

23 June 2019

People in a stock exchange

AIs are learning to understand human behaviour

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images

AIs are becoming irrational gamblers. Artificial intelligence trained on human-made gambling decisions has picked up our illogical habits, but that could help machines better predict human behaviour.

The most rational gambling tactic is to pick the bet with the greatest average reward — the one that nets the most if repeated millions of times. But even when this option is clear humans tend to gamble irrationally, fixating on worst case scenarios and being overly averse to loss.

This irrationality, makes humans difficult to predict, affecting everything from our understanding of how…

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