Android: has read everything ever written about the game of poker.
Also android: has never heard of bluffing.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
310 points (98.4% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
5739 readers
1029 users here now
/c/TenForward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags.
Use spoiler tags in comments, and NSFW checkbox for posts.
This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
My interactions with AI finally give me some understanding for why Data is the way he is.
Trying to use an AI image generator it still blows my mind how difficult the simplest of prompts are.
It really makes the holodeck seem WAY more amazing when you think about it. Just being able to build a cohesive environment that exists in euclidean space, from a vague vocal prompt, is an achievement.
IRC I think it's only the holodecks on the Enterprise D that were advanced enough to create environments from scratch in real time using the ship's computer. Other holodecks we've seen only had saved presets and the ones on DS9 had to be loaded with holodeck programs that were created elsewhere by programmers.
From my understanding you could go into any holodeck and begin creating a world through prompts, but it could take some time to get things just right.
Or you could aquire a pre-made program for a curated experience.
Turn out, all the cheap holodeck stuff is just cobbled together asset flips and lazy prompts
I've been rewatching DS9, and the way that the baseball holodeck program is described gave me this impression too. It makes me smile to imagine Sisko iterating towards the end goal, with his dumbass nerd grin on his face
Same with LLMs. I hate how you have to constantly refine your prompts to get it to answer even a simple question sometimes.
Some of the results are pretty crazy detailed based on a simple prompt. But even something simple like "person walking out of a room" and the image is the person walking into a room...that's what makes it frustrating. Even simple thing like "John is wearing a purple shirt and brown shorts. Sally is wearing a green shirt and grey skirt.". Yet half the results are John is wearing a purple skirt and a gray shirt 🤷♂️
Aw heck with it, if anyone needs me I'll be at the dom-jot tables.
Just watch out for the sore-loser Nausicaans.
He can absolutely see through those cards. We trust that he's not cheating the same way we trust anyone isn't cheating any other time. She probably wouldn't actually be that into him (and they would have never been an item) if he wasn't already better than most men at handling and controlling his emotions. (I think Worf was her "Bad Boy" phase because he is so awful at controlling his and just funnels everything into angry sex.) Point being, if anyone can bluff her, it's him. Probabilities are useful, but counting cards in most poker variants isn't that much of an advantage.
Does card counting work in what I am assuming is 5 card poker.
No, but it is irrelevant. Data could cheat on a scale that none of them could match, especially since he is dealing. He'd be capable of stacking the deck so fast that it is imperceptible - even potentially a few turns ahead. His advantage here is ridiculous.
He can probably distinguish the cards by miniscule differences on the back
But that’s unethical so he would play the game as if he didn’t know that
Yep, that's how he dealt all those 3s in that time loop episode.
Right but he very specifically would never cheat, right? So that part isn't really a factor.
Card counting can conceivably provide information, but it's not likely to because the deck is shuffled for every hand and there are usually a bunch of cards you never get to see.
Card counting works in blackjack when many hands are dealt from the same deck or shoe, and discards are placed face up so they can be counted.
The more cards you've seen, the more information you have about what's left in the deck.
It does, but not in the way it does in blackjack.
Basically, if you can guess at the cards people have thrown away, you can update your probability map of what is likely to come out.
Most players use a fixed mapping for calculation, since it gets maths heavy. Data could do it in real time and gain a small edge.
He could also correlate betting patterns with historical plays to estimate hands. All good players do this, but data would be excellent at it.
Counting is also significantly more complex for poker than it would be for blackjack. With blackjack you don't have to take the suit into account, and each card except Aces have a static value when trying to add up to 21.
With poker, a single card's value is significantly different depending on the other cards in your hand. A 4 of hearts is only significant of you have several hearts, other 4s of other suits, or consecutive numbered cards for a straight.
That's why most poker players use static probabilities. It gets even worse when there uncertainty involved. E.g. your 40% sure a player had an AK before folding. Along with an 80% they didn't have a spade.
The Human mind is incredibly good at doing calculations like this. Unfortunately it has to be learnt, and is in the form of "feels" rather than actionable probabilities.
It's also important to note that if Poker were just about probability, we would have had computers beating everyone a long time ago. It's a much more complicated problem than that.
It's actually 5D poker.
Geordi once even said he looks through the cards "but only after the game" (wink wink).
How the Hell did Geordi wink?!
With his eyelids like everyone else. He's blind, not eyeless or eyelidless.
Same way Leela does, but with one less eye.
I should have done this a long time ago.