The clash between the four best players of the Heads-up No-limit Texas Hold’em and Claudico, an artificial intelligence program, ended in a subtle win for the human players.
After 80,000 hands were played over the course of two weeks at the Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence tournament, held at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, four of the top 10 poker players were able to attain a $732,713 lead over the A.I. program. But due to the fact that $170 million was bet during the competition, the results can’t be accepted as scientifically reliable. Despite the fact that humans managed to get a slight lead, the competition ended in a tie, according to PR Newswire.
It is worth noting that players were betting with theoretical dollars, or chips instead of real money, during the competition, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
However, close results kept the audience wondering not if, but when the artificial intelligence was going to beat the human poker players.
“I wouldn’t bet on humans much longer,” said Michael Bowlin, a computer science professor at the University of Alberta in Canada and the developer of one of the major poker programs.
Claudico was created by a team of scientists from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who used algorithms instead of programming in human poker expertise. Claudico was run on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Blacklight computer with just the poker rules as its input. The same type of algorithms could be used to create applications used in medicine, cybersecurity or business transactions.
[quote text_size=”small” author=”– Doug Polk” author_title=”Professional poker player who played in the competition”]
Claudico is good, but not a first-class player. At certain times, it plays well, but some of its bets were highly unusual. (…) Betting $19,000 to win a small $700 pot isn’t something a real person would do.
[/quote]
The researchers at CMU are among the world’s leading scientist in computational game theory, natural language processing, speech translation and computer vision. They’re known for their computer chess program which defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov back in 1997.
“Artificial intelligence will soon be able to clearly exceed the play of top professionals,” said Tuomas Sandholm, the CMU professor who directed the development of Claudico. “Now we have 80,000 hands of data on how professionals play the game, and my team is already working on improving algorithms in hopes of creating more perfect successors to Claudico.”
In other news here on Immortal News, scientist have developed an artificial photosynthesis system that turns carbon dioxide, water and solar energy into valuable chemical products.
Are you surprised that the human players beat the poker-playing AI?
