Research Interests
Sam’s primary research area is computational game theory. He developed the idea of real-time subgame solving in no-limit Texas hold’em which was the key scientific idea that led to superhuman play. He has worked on algorithms for computing Nash equilibria in complex game classes: games with extremely large state spaces, games with imperfect information, multiplayer games, stochastic games, and continuous games. He has also devised several new practical and robust solution concepts. His research has also addressed modeling and exploitation of suboptimal opponents, computation of human-understandable strategies, and applications to national security. Recently he has been interested in applications of optimization and game theory to cancer treatment, which is the focus of his project at Cornell. He has a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.