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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.
it dethrones the idea that poker is the last bastion of human dominance in cognition
I think that idea was dethroned when Bill "The Bluff" Higgins got a train to Boston in 1872 with his pockets full of winnings, and strode into Harvard saying "Gentleman, the finest minds in the world have recently met in the back room of McKluskey's Hotel, and held a competition of arithmetic, stoney faces and drinking, to determine a winner. And I am that winner. Your work, professors, is needed no more. A dominant mind has been chosen."
Seriously, what makes poker attractive as a benchmark of AI is that it is essentially simple (like chess, go and most other card or board games), but contains a very small element of modest complexity (bluffing).
Compare that to a game like Pictionary. Pictionary is vastly, vastly more complex than poker. When two computers with cameras and screens can beat a pair of humans at pictionary, I'll be impressed.
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