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."

Comments

Important milestone

[Mostly a lurker]

Unlike with games like Chess (best moves can be precisely calculated) and Backgammon (simple probabilities), Poker requires adapting to human behavior, indeed varying your play depending on what you learn about your opponent. The techniques are going to be applicable to a wide range of situations. For instance, I will go so far as to claim that we will shortly be wise to use an AI to advise us on investment decisions. (In the past, the computer has been used for speed, and reacting to subtle market signals, but not so much for long term investment planning.)

The next challenge is going to be independent learning. I believe human experts still supervise the learning process of all the best AIs. Once the need for the human adviser goes away, AIs are literally going to be everywhere. Your phone AI will recognize and react to your current mental state, as well as help you overcome everyday problems. The AI in your fridge could become a huge help in keeping you compliant with your diet plans.

Re:Important milestone

[lgw]

Not as humans play it. You don't play the early game, or any area where pieces are sparse, by exhaustive analysis, but that's where the mechanical search space would be largest. (Much like humans don't play the endgame in chess that way.) "Complexity" of the naive search space, before even the most basic pruning, isn't an interesting measure.

Playing as humans play, the early game in chess is more complex than go, the midgame is similar, the endgame is much more complex in go. Go is harder to write a bot for, because chess is more complex in ways that are hard for humans, while go is more complex in ways that are hard to program. Does that make it a "more complex game"? Maybe - it's all down to definitions.

Re:Heads-up Texas Holdem

[geekmux]

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.

Online Poker Turing test?

[mystik]

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?

Not so good after all.

[PPH]

Libratus has a poker tell. His CPU fan speeds up whenever he gets a good hand.