Artificial intelligence has quarterbacked the world’s best poker players

This year’s duel between artificial intelligence and the world’s best poker players has been named “Brains Vs. Artifical Intelligence: Upping the Ante”. Humans were represented by Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou. On the artificial intelligence side, the competition was played by the Libratus program.

The competition, which began on January 11, was a rematch of the. Two years ago there was a similar duel, whichóry, according to scientistsców, ended in a draw. Although proponents of human tactical thought will say that the man won, because the total of czwórka players – Dong Kim, Jason Les, Bjorn Li and Doug Polk, achieved a lead of 732,000 chipsów. In 2015, 80 thousand hands were played starting at blinds of 50/100, and the stacks were 20 thousand each. Artificial intelligence was then represented by the Claudio program, whichóry was used by the researchers to develop Libratus.

The program was created by scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. – Since the beginning of artificial intelligence research, the benchmark of development has been to defeat the championóin their respective disciplines. In 1997, Garri Kasparov with the IBM Deep Blue program fell in chess. Last year, the algorithms of the AlphaGo program defeated the master of the game of Go. Poker is a tougher challenge because it requires the program to make complex decisions based on incomplete information, considering the opponent’s playsóIn such as bluffs – mówished before the start of the tournament, Professor Tuomas Sandholm, one of the twórcóin Libratus.

Just like in chess and Go, artificial intelligence has quarterbacked poker playersów. The tournament lasted 20 days. During that time 120,000 heads-up no limit holdem hands were played. The poker players were separated from each other and stayed in separate rooms.

"Every day, for 20 days, we were played by a computer"

Twóhe developers of Libratus were not sure how the program would behave. Bookmaker services did not give him a chance by betting 4:1 against Libratus. It did not prevent the defeat of poker playersóin by the program. Libratus correctly interpreted the bluffs of poker playersów and even bluffed himself, which completely surprised his twórców.

– Every day, for 20 days, we were ogled by a computer. It’s demoralizing – admitted Jason Les. Libratus, whichóry has measured up to the champions of poker, it has much more computational power than its predecessor from before dwóch years.

The program’s victory over the world’s best poker players shows that artificial intelligence has crossed another frontier. The poker match itself was a test of how the program would handle incomplete data. And it coped superbly. In many fields, such as medicine, cybersecurity and róhe different industries we are dealing with incomplete data. The outcome of the duel opens a new path ahead for artificial intelligence.