Anwen Mulroney's blog : AI Crushes Poker Pros: A Giant Leap for Robot Kind!
Y'all, this AI robot named Libratus just took a bunch of poker sharks to school, sweeping up chips like they were confetti at a New Year's bash. We're talking a cool $1.5 million worth of chips from the crème de la crème of the poker world, right there in a Pittsburgh casino.
So, here's the lowdown: Libratus, this brainchild of AI, showed four ace poker players the door in a nail-biting, 20-day marathon that wrapped up this Monday night.
In this showdown, dubbed 'Brains vs Artificial Intelligence,' the human contenders – Dong Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou, and Daniel McAulay – were glued to their screens day in, day out. For 11 hours a day, they were trying to outplay this software whiz at no-limit Texas Hold’em. That's poker with no safety net, folks. And guess what? Libratus ran circles around 'em, grabbing over $1.7 million in chips their website.
Now, let's be clear, the poker pros' bank accounts weren't on the line (phew!), but their egos? Shattered.
This is more than just a bruised ego kind of thing for us humans; it's a red-letter day for AI.
See, beating us in chess or Go is one thing – everything's out in the open there. But poker? That's a whole new ball game. You've got hidden hands and bluffing to deal with. The AI's gotta navigate through all that fog and deception to come out on top.
Professor Tuomas Sandholm from Carnegie Mellon University and his whiz-kid PhD student Noam Brown, the masterminds behind Libratus, were like, ""This is the big leagues, folks."" Sandholm himself was sweating bullets cnn, not sure if their creation could hold its own against these seasoned card slingers.
Brown just shrugged it off and said, ""They did their best.""
Libratus wasn't just playing revenge – it was the terminator to its predecessor Claudico's John Connor, who came up short against these same pros back in 2015. This time, Libratus was packing more firepower and a killer algorithmic instinct for hidden information.
""We didn't spoon-feed Libratus the poker playbook. We just said, 'Here's how you play poker. Now go figure it out,'"" Brown said. And boy, did it learn fast, going from random plays to owning the table after trillions of hands.
After the daily poker face-off, while the rest of us were getting cozy in bed, Brown was plugging Libratus into some beast of a computer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center to amp up its game for the next day pokernews.
Meanwhile, the human players were clocking out at 10pm, barely had time to wolf down dinner, then burned the midnight oil studying the bot's moves and tweaking their tactics, only hitting the hay around 2am.
Jason Les, who's seen some things, man, after squaring off against Claudico too, was like, ""This bot is next level. It's kinda soul-crushing.""
""Facing a bot is relentless; it doesn't get tired or emotional. You're just there, getting your butt kicked for 11 hours, and it messes with your head because we're not built to take that many L's,"" he admitted.
But hey, it's not all doom and gloom for the poker squad. They split a $200,000 pot based on how they stacked up against Libratus.
And they've learned a thing or two from Libratus's bold playstyle. Les pointed out, ""It's like boot camp for poker. Now, no human can throw us off our game.""
Brown's looking at Libratus like a proud dad watching his kid win the spelling bee. ""It's bluffing, it's strategizing, and I'm like, 'I didn't even know it had that in it!' It's a wild ride, creating something this clever,"" he beamed.
And it's not just poker where Libratus could show us up. The tech could shake things up in business, the military, cybersecurity cbc, even healthcare – basically, any scene where strategic thinking and making decisions with limited info is key.
Roman V Yampolskiy, a computer science hotshot, is like, ""Hold up, poker is the least of our worries. We've got a machine that can outplay us in real-world stuff. That's kind of a big deal, folks.""
For Brown, it's all about busting myths about what humans versus machines can do. ""This idea that poker's too human for bots? That's a bunch of hooey. It's not about reading faces; it's about playing the odds,"" he said.
""We're witnessing a game-changer in what machines are capable of. And even though I don't see them writing bestsellers just yet, never say never,"" he added with a wink.
