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AI Decisively Defeats Four Pro Poker Players In 'Brains Vs AI' Tournament (ieee.org)
Halfway through the "Brains vs. AI" poker competition, it was pretty clear the artificial intelligence named Libratus would end up victorious against its human opponents, who are four of the world's top professional players. Lo and behold, Libratus lived up to its "balanced and forceful" Latin name by becoming the first AI to beat professional poker players at heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold'em, reports IEEE Spectrum. From the report: The tournament was held at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh from 11-30 January. Developed by Carnegie Mellon University, the AI won the "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence" tournament against four poker pros by $1,766,250 in chips over 120,000 hands (games). Researchers can now say that the victory margin was large enough to count as a statistically significant win, meaning that they could be at least 99.7 percent sure that the AI victory was not due to chance. Previous attempts to develop poker-playing AI that can exploit the mistakes of opponents -- whether AI or human -- have generally not been overly successful, says Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. Libratus instead focuses on improving its own play, which he describes as safer and more reliable compared to the riskier approach of trying to exploit opponent mistakes. Even more importantly, the victory demonstrates how AI has likely surpassed the best humans at doing strategic reasoning in "imperfect information" games such as poker. The no-limit Texas Hold'em version of poker is a good example of an imperfect information game because players must deal with the uncertainty of two hidden cards and unrestricted bet sizes. An AI that performs well at no-limit Texas Hold'em could also potentially tackle real-world problems with similar levels of uncertainty. In other words, the Libratus algorithms can take the "rules" of any imperfect-information game or scenario and then come up with its own strategy. The Libratus victory comes two years after a first "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence" competition held at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh in April-May 2015.
Most of poker is based off math, not tells.
You get an idea of whether they are loose or tight players (i.e. bluff often vs bluff rarely), by their play/fold ratios on the various streets.
You get the idea of their possible hands from their betting patterns (e.g. if a player that doesn't play often raises pre-flop, and then tries to represent having a 8-5 for a straight on a rainbow board, it's not convincing. They'll have an over-pair to the board, or possibly a set at most).
And lastly you play what the odds tell you to play (if the odds are 25% that the player is bluffing, then if you only have to put in 1 chip for every 5 that are already in the pot, it makes sense to call, regardless of usually losing [because making that bet often enough will earn money in the long run (+EV - expected value)]).
Getting tells is a minuscule part of poker.
Playing based on the odds means every opponent knows what you'll do 100% of the time... Guess how that turns out.
No it doesn't.
Your opponent doesn't know what your cards are, but you do. You have disparate sets of information regarding the game state. Playing the odds perfectly and uniformly deterministically in ambiguous situations (all players making predictable choices when multiple choices have the same weight) results in different players arriving at different ideas of the game state and making different decisions, even if all the players are robots running the same exact deterministic algorithm that's a function of the known game state.
Luck tends to not be the most consistent factor in a tournament, that's why you frequently see the same professional players making it through to the top 50 and frequently even the final table out of thousands. When you take the human factor out and boil it down to purely mathematics (i.e. chance and betting patterns etc) I would expect a computer to win long term. Poker though is more than just mathematics, it is about reading people and quite often manipulating them, playing a computer isn't the same as playing poker at a table of people.
I play a lot of poker, both in cash games and in tournaments. Luck is a HUGE factor in tournaments. That is why so many unknown players win them. If it was mostly skill, then only the pros would be winning them, which absolutely IS NOT the case.
There is a saying in poker tournaments: in order to win, to have to win your share of "coin flips." An example of a "coin flip" is my matched (paired) hole cards against your two cards that are higher than mine. For example, my pair of 8s against your King-Queen. My pair only has a 52% chance of winning the hand. You have a 48% chance of improving your hand with any King or Queen, or making a higher straight, flush, or full house than I do.
That being said, luck is only a factor at the end of the hand, when both of us have to show our cards. I often say that "poker is about everything except the cards, unless and until you have paid to see my cards." If I can make you fold with just my betting, then the cards are irrelevant. That happens in AT LEAST 4 out of 5 hands in live games. Most of the time, poker is about the size of my chip stack vs. yours, who bet first, how much they bet, how often they bet, how often they raise, how many hands they play (vs. just folding), how much they usually raise, do they have an aggressive image at the table, do they ever re-raise, have you seen them fold every time someone raises, etc., etc.
You're actually not right. It can be AI without being sentient, and in this case, it is just that. It's a general purpose learning algorithm. Not a strategic poker playing algorithm. It doesn't need to be sentient to be intelligent. You're confusing General AI with Narrow AI. This is a Narrow AI, to be sure, but if you string enough Narrow AI's up together, they can eventually give the same appearance of a General AI. This is just one milestone along the way. In particular, it dethrones the idea that poker is the last bastion of human dominance in cognition. Obviously we'll have to find a new bastion, like the fact that we are, so far, the only General Intelligence thus far observed or produced.
Speak for yourself.