Artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University has defeated the world’s best professional poker players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em.
Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Noam Brown, a grad student designed the AI called Libratus.
The Claudico, an earlier AI, was involved in a poker tournament in April-May 2015 and couldn’t beat the humans, with the match ending in a statistical tie. The Libratus victory comes two years after a first “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence” competition held at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh.
An artificial-intelligence program known as Libratus has beaten the world’s absolute best human poker players in a 20-day No-Limit Texas Hold’em tournament, defeating four opponents by about $1.77 million in poker chips, according to Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino, where the “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence” poker tournament was held.
Over the past twenty years, machines have defeated the best human players at checkers, chess, Scrabble, Jeopardy, and Go. Computer scientists can now add Texas Hold’em to a growing list of games — including chess, Go and “Jeopardy!” — in which AI can beat the best human competitor in the world. Since IBM’s Deep Blue bested chess player Garry Kasparov in 1997, the robots have been gaining on humans. Last year, AI shocked the world by trouncing the world’s best Go player in a set of matches in the strategy game involving black and white stones. The task was so difficult because Go contains more potential moves than atoms in the universe. To tackle that problem, the computer, known as AlphaGo, used a deep-learning strategy, a spookily powerful method that involves computing calculations at one layer and then feeding those up to another layer in the algorithm.