Artificial Intelligence ‘Lengpudashi’ to Battle Top Chinese Pros

The race for the best Artificial Intelligence (AI) has intensified! A new version of Libratus, an AI that had defeated four poker pros in January is being developed to battle a team of top Chinese poker pros. Just a month ago, another AI, DeepStack had defeated 11 poker pros, including well-known poker pro Phil Laak.

Libratus was a creation of the Carnegie Mellon University, which now developing its upgraded sibling, titled, Lengpudashi. The name means ‘cold poker master’. Lengpudashi will fight “Team Dragons” a group of six Chinese pros led by Alan (Yue) Du, who has to his credit a World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet that he won in 2016.

Libratus and Team Dragon will compete in a 36,000-hand challenge between April 6 -10 in Hainan with $2,90,000 for the winner at stake. The challenge will last 10 hours a day, with the software playing two hands a time on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges Computer.

Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science and co-creator of Libratus, along with Noam Brown, Ph. D. student are also behind Lengpudashi. Sandholm told the media, “I want to explore various commercial opportunities for this in poker and a host of other application areas ranging from recreational games to business strategy to strategic pricing to cybersecurity and medicine”.

In our last article on AI, we had explained why AIs were pitted against poker pros. At that time, PokerGuru had reported about DeepStack. In fact, the creators of DeepStack had claimed that theirs was a far superior bot, as it was ‘intuitive’ and required far less computing time and space than Libratus. DeepStack had overcome 11 pros, playing 4,000 hands over a period of four weeks. The war had begun in 2015 with AI Claudico, which had failed against four pros in a 13-day and 80,000-hand challenge.

The new Lengpudashi vs Team Dragons however, will be more of a science experiment than a true fight. It will be a part of an exhibition – Hainan Resort Software Community, being hosted at Haikou City, and organized by Sinovation Ventures.

Currently most of the bots are only adept at heads up no-limt hold’em. But, Brown claimed that they could soon go far ahead and said, “research on six-max poker is going to start to happen and I think that the field is going to develop very quickly. I think that with some minor improvements to Libratus, you’d be able to see it beating humans at six-max within two years.”