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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.
oh no it can't. yes it can. no it can't.
I don't play poker enough to know, but I wonder if many human players at the top level also try to win through discerning tells and weaknesses of opponents... if an AI can win so consistently is is using a technique that a human could also learn to get a step ahead of todays other human players?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
1. Poker companies make their money from the "rake", which is a (capped) percentage of the pot. They get their money regardless of who wins.
2. Poker companies want you to keep playing, because that way you'll continue contributing to the pot (and therefore, to the rake). Players that lose too much, leave. That's why some poker companies offer tutorials and "schools" to retain players by helping them improve.
3. Poker companies that operate in highly regulated markets have their code audited, their installations inspected and each and every hand submitted in real-time to the regulatory authority for possible future scrutiny. Player trust is very important, being caught cheating will cause the players to switch to the competitors.
I don't play poker enough to know, but I wonder if many human players at the top level also try to win through discerning tells and weaknesses of opponents... if an AI can win so consistently is is using a technique that a human could also learn to get a step ahead of todays other human players?
These are all online pros (4 of the top 10 in the world). So their game is essentially entirely based on discerning patterns of betting behaviors and action frequencies.
Humans are still bad at statistics and machines can lie without any outward signs.
What is the point of this news?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The AI would probably have an advantage as its less likely to have discerning tells of its own because all of the easily discoverable ones would have been caught much earlier on, whereas human players who've only played against other human players might not have spotted and obvious and exploitable pattern in their play yet and even though the AI "knows" what it is, it can't easily tell them what they're doing wrong.
An AI that performs well at no-limit Texas Hold'em could also potentially tackle real-world problems with similar levels of uncertainty.
We should plug it into all military hardware and put it in charge of all ICBM and SLBM launch decisions. Oh, and its hardware should have lots and lots of blinking lights...
and reel-to-reel tape drives.
Which human's math skills? Humans have a staggering range of capabilities. Average? Then average in which way? A savant? Then a savant in which way?
And what about autistics who happen to be very good at poker but lousy at reading human expressions?
There are multiple different ways to be good at poker, and this system is just using one of them, and is clearly quite good at this particular way.
I also didn't see anyone making the claim that this was a hard or general purpose AI. It's not, and you acting like someone did make that claim is kind of weird. It's a system that is beating some of the best players at a game that was previously deemed to be very challenging to do computationally.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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.
In No Limit Hold'em, there are no 'odds.'
Holdem is a game of playing with odds. How you decide to play them is the question.
Annette Obrestad who, at age 19, won the European championship and she never looked at her cards, not for a single hand
Without wanting in any way to diminish her accomplishment, she didn't win WSOP Europe playing blind. She won something like a 180 seat online tournament playing blind. Also she looked at her cards in several all-in situations. It remains, nonetheless, a super-impressive display of positional play. But here's the point, she won playing blind by laying the right odds in the right situations ... Understanding what a particular bet size means in any given situation requires an appreciation of the odds involved in that situation.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Everybody keeps saying that, somehow, a computer being able to play poker is the next step up from Go. I think this 'easy' victory shows that it's not that, but that poker is really just quite a stupid game. Which _people_ try to play by 'reading faces', but that you _should_ play - as any gamble - by statistics.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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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If you only bet when the odds were in your favor, you would slowly bleed your stack away because the other players would immediately fold as soon as you bet. Then you'd have a "bad beat" when someone called and got an improbable card to win the hand when their odds were incredibly low. You'd probably lose a lot of money in those situations.
With a little experience, simply calculating your odds is quite easy to do. However knowing when you're in a position of power or weakness is not nearly as easy to calculate.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
The game being played was online poker, so nobody was reading anybody's face making it an equal contest. Check the source article.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Running an undeclared bot that takes players' money is worse than cheating, it is criminal fraud (or possibly worse, I am not a law expert). The premise of poker is that you do not play against the house, you play against other players and pay the house for providing the venue. Given that the Libratus' play style measurably differs from a human's, it will be easily detected by analysis.
You might have as well suggested that the poker company fudge the amount of money in players' accounts and hope nobody notices.
#3 is not funny, it is a pain in the ass due to the number of hoops one needs to jump through and having the software flexible enough to support all the different requirements the regulators come up with.
I don't have publicly-accessible links to give you, but if you are interested to learn more about the subject, I suggest researching the French regulations from ARJEL and the Italian ones from AAMS.
An essential element of any poker game is reading your opponent and making them misread you or not read you at all.
Apparently not, because the computer won without that element. Or are these alternative facts ?