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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.
Poker has for a long time been a game that was considered very difficult for AIs to do. We're now in a situation where very rapidly many things that we think of as hard problems for AI (playing poker, playing Go, image recognition, translation) are having AI close to equal or surpass humans. That should be concerning at multiple levels: first, this will have large-scale economic impacts. Second, and potentially more disturbingly, it means that we are closer to the point where AI may pose an existential risk to humans, and that tipping point could occur with very little warning.
A lot of people have been trumpeting on about how computers will never be able to beat humans at poker. It's the same old song and dance. 1) Identify activity X that AIs can't do. 2) Attribute it to some made up quality that only all humans supposed possess. 3) AI beats humans. 4) "Well, what's so difficult about activity X? No one has ever claimed it was unachievable" 5) Restart process with activity X+1.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.