Man vs Machine Battle For Poker Dominance Resumes on January 11

The battle between man and machine continues with four poker pros Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou all set to face a unique challenge when they will compete against new artificial intelligence Libratus developed by Carnegie Mellon University. The “Brains Vs Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante” event is scheduled to begin on January 11 at Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino and will see whether the odds favor man or machine.

It will be an interesting 20 days that will have 120,000 hands of heads-up No-Limit Hold’em action between the pros and Libratus for a share of $200,000 in prize money.

The pros will pair up and play duplicate matches (with each pair receiving the same cards as the computer in each scenario) on the casino floor and in an isolated separate room. The increased number of days and the “two-table” play (playing two hands simultaneously) will increase the chance of reaching statistical significance. The duel will be open for general public who can watch the proceedings daily during playing hoursm which will stretch from 1am to around 7 pm.

Last year too, a similar experiment was tried out when four poker pros took on Claudico, an artificial intelligence programme created by the same University team.

In the two-week battle, Claudico collected less chips than three of the four competitors, playing out 80,000 hands.

This year, Libratus has been created to set a new benchmark for artificial intelligence.

“Since the earliest days of AI research, beating top human players has been a powerful measure of progress in the field,” said Tuomas Sandholm, the professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who created the bot with his PHD student Noam Brown.

“That was achieved with chess in 1997, with Jeopardy! In 2009 and with the board game Go just last year. Poker poses a far more difficult challenge than these games, as it requires a machine to make extremely complicated decisions based on incomplete information while contending with bluffs, slow play and other ploys,” he added.

But Sandholm has learned from last year’s experience. “We knew Claudico was the strongest computer poker programme in the world, but we had no idea before this competition how it would fare against four Top 10 poker players,” he had said then.

This Libratus artificial intelligence poker bot was created from scratch with an algorithm developed to compute strategies for imperfect information games and to use the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridge supercomputer to calculate the potential winning strategy.

Taking a step forward over Claudico, 15 million core hours of computation has been used for Libratus versus the two to three million core hours for Claudico. Other improvements include some “weird moves” like limping (a favoured strategy of the old bot which was exploited by the players) and new technology to achieve Nash equilibrium – a strategy that neither player can benefit from changing strategy if the other player’s strategy remains the same.

Libratus, which means balanced and powerful in Latin, will also use a method to find equilibrium faster, identifying hands that are not promising and ignoring these paths in the future, and use the Bridges computer to do live computations with a new endgame-solving approach and algorithm.

The results from this game are likely to have implications for other sectors that are characterised by incomplete and misleading information, like business, military, cybersecurity and medicine.