The Speculist

From a game-theoretic point of view, I don't see any reason that we couldn't program the ultimate poker player. "tells" are human artifacts. Though AI poker players could communicate and negotiate with other poker players through subtle means (eg, pauses of particular length).

Yes. In fact, come to think of it, the ultimate poker player would have no tells at all (aside from fake ones used to distract and confuse his opponents) but he would be extremely good at reading the tells of others. Poker games between two AIs would be pretty boring, but between a human and an AI -- we're talking Gasparov vs Deep Blue.

I think you could create the ultimate poker playing robot - a machine like Deep Blue calculating away with no awareness of the outside world.

But once you create a self-aware robot with a flexible, robust neural-network capable of doing an endless variety of things like we humans, with a human-like body, it would almost have to have "tells" - unless you paralyzed the poor thing.

"Tells" come from the subconcious mind. Once an AI has a higher mind, it's subconscious mind might be on display as much as that of a human.

I think really sophisticated AI would develop something akin to "tells."

But they might be different than a human's. Maybe a change in the electromagnetic field or processing speed that other AIs could sense. Something beyond human sensory capacity.