Artificial Intelligence Beats Human Texas Hold’em Poker Players

By admin On Jan 31, 2017

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A system running artificial intelligence software called Libratus defeated four professional Texas Hold’em poker players in a 20-day tournament. In 2015, human players managed to beat an AI system.

The Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante competition kicked off Jan. 11 at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. There, four poker players competed against Libratus at Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker. The four specialized in this form of two-person poker and were considered the world’s best players.

As the tournament progressed, it appeared that Libratus took the initiative. Initially, the players say they underestimated the program. “The bot is getting better and better every day,” said one of them a week and a half ago. In the night from Monday to Tuesday they turned out defeated to be. With that, the four lose $ 200,000.

Libratus, Latin for “balance,” was developed by Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and student Noam Brown. The tricky part about the poker game chosen for the AI is that bluffing plays an important role, as does making decisions based on missing or misleading information. As the tournament progressed, Libratus’ algorithms were able to improve the strategy.

The calculations to adapt to the playing style of the human opponents were done at night, after the games of the day at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. There, Libratus runs from the Bridge cluster, which was built in conjunction with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It consists of 800 nodes and thus covers 22,400 cores. The program was able to put 600 of those nodes, each with 128GB of ram, to work.

According to the researchers, with the victory they have raised the bar for artificial intelligence again. Ultimately, programs like Libratus can be used to negotiate business agreements and make medical treatments, they expect.

It’s the umpteenth time that an AI beats a human in a game. Prominent previous victories have been IBM’s Deep Blue against Kasparov at chess and Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo against LeeSe-dol at Go.