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An AI Is Finally Trouncing The World's Best Poker Players (cmu.edu)
Halfway through the "Brains vs. AI" poker competition, an AI named Libratus is trouncing its human opponents, who are four of the world's top professional players.
One of the pros, Jimmy Chou, said he and his colleagues initially underestimated Libratus, but have come to regard it as one tough player. "The bot gets better and better every day," Chou said. "It's like a tougher version of us"... Chou said he and the other pros have shared notes and tips each day, looking for weaknesses they can each exploit. "The first couple of days, we had high hopes," Chou said. "But every time we find a weakness, it learns from us and the weakness disappears the next day."
By Saturday, the AI had amassed a lead of $693,531 after 56,732 hands in the 120,000-hand match (which is being livestreamed by the Rivers Casino on Twitch). "I'm feeling good," said Tuomas Sandholm, the computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who co-created the AI. "The algorithms are performing great. They're better at solving strategy ahead of time, better at driving strategy during play and better at improving strategy on the fly."
By Saturday, the AI had amassed a lead of $693,531 after 56,732 hands in the 120,000-hand match (which is being livestreamed by the Rivers Casino on Twitch). "I'm feeling good," said Tuomas Sandholm, the computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who co-created the AI. "The algorithms are performing great. They're better at solving strategy ahead of time, better at driving strategy during play and better at improving strategy on the fly."
Cue the goal post shifting.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Basically, it is the skill to con a human. I see great reprehensible applications in advertising, manipulation of elections and other fields of human-created evil.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Heads-up (2 player) Texas Holdem is not the most commonly played version of poker.
Most people play Texas Holdem in groups of 6 or 9 players. Working out an optimal strategy to beat multiple opponents is a LOT harder than beating a single player. We may have a dominant heads-up poker AI soon, but I would expect it to take several more years for a dominant multi-player to be created.
Uh, several more years? Allow me to quote one of the poker players:
"...every time we find a weakness, it learns from us and the weakness disappears the next day."
Let's not underestimate the power of learning at damn near an exponential rate. I expect an AI multi-player tournament next year to crush human opponents. How quickly do you think an AI supercomputer could process every single hand of play that a professional poker player has ever made in their life to analyze and exploit every weakness to be able to predict behavioral patterns with great accuracy? Lather, rinse and repeat for the top dozen poker players in the world. How to get AI to beat humans in a game of finite limits and statistical values is not exactly a mystery.
The largest mistake mankind could make is underestimating the speed at which AI will prove it can do a lot of things better, faster, and more accurately than any human could ever do. Underestimating that speed will greatly reduce our ability to properly prepare for a world of unemployable humans.
tl;dr Poker isn't dead, yet.
AI beating humans at a game is merely a beta test. The real application will feed unending greed, which will never die.
Poker doesn't.
It just has a larger search space.
We've only just got to the point where Chess is beatable, very recently in computing terms.
We've only just seen a tiny glimpse that Go may be beatable. Google's AI is literally leaps-and-bounds ahead of the game in that respect as the search space is so much unbelievably huger than chess that chess is laughable in comparison.
The search space for poker - the card game - is complete. We know it exactly, down to the probability of everything. What we don't have the search space for is the betting (which, if fine-grained down to the dollar, increases as you win!). This AI is playing the search space for both, for the best result, and winning, for one particular variant of the card game.
When you have many players around the table playing this same game, it becomes orders of magnitude more complex in the betting again. The search space is still just searchable though.
This isn't adapting to human behaviour, it's learning when it loses. It knows when it loses, and it finds other paths and writes off the paths that took it to a loss. If it was playing human behaviour, it would have a webcam and a mic and be analysing stress patterns.
But, strangely, despite all the bollocks that high-end poker players spout, it's winning without all that. It's winning by just knowing what the odds are in a complex search space that humans wouldn't be able to manage.
Humans might win by analysing their opponents. This thing just wins by knowing the odds properly for the betting, and playing them.
You can't bluff probability.
And despite both our uses of the word, it's not AI in the slightest. It's not intelligent. It's just playing lots and recording the results. There's a difference. Underneath, it's still just a dumb machine brute-forcing a game-graph. It's just that the game-graph is much more complex than "how many cards left in the pack", so it can't necessarily get through it all, but it gets further through it than any of its predecessor's attempts.
Poker isn't some magical game that only works when humans try to interpret humans. It's just a game like any other. And any game that you add fine-grained betting in a complex rounds system to, with money going up to hundreds of thousands of units, just has complexity far beyond what a standard computer could brute-force or a human can calculate.
It's at that point that a "sufficiently advanced technology" is miscategorised as "magic" or - in Poker - psychology.
I've never used an online gambling site, but doesn't the existence of this AI kill off the fairness of these sites?
If a user is running this in his or her basement, wouldn't it pay more to just babysit the AI, acting on all the human-check capchas the sites deploy, and just doing what the AI decides?
This makes online poker effectively gold farming?
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?