Contact information

Email: Click here to reveal my email address
Office: Gates 9223

About me

I am a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon working with Tuomas Sandholm in the Electronic Marketplaces Lab. Previously, I received an A.B. in math from Harvard and developed algorithms for trading currencies at Tower Research Capital. I am also a pretty avid poker player.


Research

My main interests are in artificial intelligence and computational game theory. I am particularly interested in developing new approaches for computing strong game-theoretic strategies and exploiting suboptimal opponents in large games. I am the lead developer of our Texas Hold'em agents, which compete in the Annual Computer Poker Competition. Our most recent agent, Tartanian5, finished in second place using the bankroll instant run-off scoring rule in the 2012 two-player no-limit Texas Hold'em competition.

Papers

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2013. Improving Performance in Imperfect-Information Games with Large State and Action Spaces by Solving Endgames. Computer Poker and Imperfect Information Workshop at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2013. Action Translation in Extensive-Form Games with Large Action Spaces: Axioms, Paradoxes, and the Pseudo-Harmonic Mapping. To appear in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2012. Tartanian5: A Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em Poker-Playing Program. Computer Poker Symposium at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2012. Safe Opponent Exploitation. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC).

Sam Ganzfried, Tuomas Sandholm, and Kevin Waugh. 2012. Strategy Purification and Thresholding: Effective Non-Equilibrium Approaches for Playing Large Games. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

Sam Ganzfried. 2011. Computing Strong Game-Theoretic Strategies in Jotto. In Proceedings of the Conference on Advances in Computer Games (ACG).

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2011. Game Theory-Based Opponent Modeling in Large Imperfect-Information Games. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2010. Computing Equilibria by Incorporating Qualitative Models. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). Extended version appeared as CMU technical report CMU-CS-10-105.

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2009. Computing Equilibria in Multiplayer Stochastic Games of Imperfect Information. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

Sam Ganzfried and Tuomas Sandholm. 2008. Computing an Approximate Jam/Fold Equilibrium for 3-Player No-Limit Texas Hold'em Tournaments. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

Sam Ganzfried. 2004. A New Algorithm for Knight's Tours. In Proceedings of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program in Mathematics.