Robot beats world’s best at no limit Hold’em

Not sure whether to be impressed or terrified about this one.

A computer program has just conclusively beaten four poker pros in a marathon 20 day tournament.

The Brains v Artificial Intelligence Re-match (the humans won last time round!) ran from 11 until 30 January.

In the human corner were four of the world’s best Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker players: Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou.

In the AI corner was Libratus; the brain child of computer science professor Tuomas Sandholm and PhD student Noam Brown, both from Carnegie Mellon University.

The Challenge with Poker and AI

Apparently when it comes to games of complete and perfect knowledge like Go and Chess, machines have had our measure for some time now. The difficulty with poker is that the program must learn to deal with unknowns like competitor’s hands, when, whether and to what extent it should bluff, as well as how to deal with misleading information (opponents bluffing).

Every heard that poker saying, ‘play the man, not the cards’. The machine must learn to do this which necessitates adapting different a strategy for different competitors.

The answer to this challenge according to Brown:

“We didn’t tell Libratus how to play poker. We gave it the rules of poker and said ‘learn on your own’…”

As Dr Sandholm puts it:

“We don’t write the strategy, we write the algorithm that computes the strategy.”

Libratus’ strategy was then honed by playing trillions of hands on a supercomputer – gaining poker experience faster than Neo learned Kung Fu in the Matrix.

Poor humans never stood a chance!

The Brains V AI Rematch

The Brains V AI Rematch involved each of the 4 poker pros slugging it out heads-up, all day, every day for 20 days against Libratus to see who (or what) would be chip leader at tourney’s end .

Libratus was actually a 4:1 outsider with the bookmakers, probably reflecting the result of the original Brains v AI poker challenge that took place in 2015 and which saw 3 of the humans beat the computer program called Claudico, also developed by Sandholm.

This time around, Libratus was never headed and finished with a convincing $1.7 million chip lead.

According to said Jason Les:

“Libratus turned out to be way better than we imagined. It’s slightly demoralizing” 

Doesn’t make you want to rush into any online poker rooms in a hurry!

A bit about Libratus, from it’s developer…

The tourney and player comments…