Top Poker Pros To Take On New Poker BotContest To Feature Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay, Jimmy Chou |
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A rematch between a poker-playing computer program designed by Carnegie Mellon University and some of the world’s top heads-up no-limit hold’em pros has been announced.
The match, which will take place at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, will begin on Jan. 11 and will feature Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou. In May 2015, Les and Kim, along with Doug Polk and Bjorn Li, defeated CMU’s poker bot Claudico, which was considered the best in the world at the time.
They each played 20,000 hands against computer scientist Tuomas Sandholm’s machine and were up a combined 732,700 chips, which was more than 7,300 big blinds. Despite the win, researchers at Carnegie Mellon didn’t believe it proved Claudico was inferior to the humans, given the variance in poker, the relatively small sample size and the margin of victory.
Sandholm called it a “statistical tie.” In an interview with Card Player, Les said that even though the humans came out on top, “the future is pretty strong for poker bots.”
This time around, the humans will play 120,000 hands against Libratus, the new machine. The hands will be spread out over nearly three weeks, and the poker pros are on a $200,000 freeroll. Libratus, a Latin word meaning balanced and powerful, is the latest in a series of poker bots from Sandholm and his team.
“I thought Claudico was tough to play; knowing the resources and the ideas that Dr. Sandholm and his team have had available in the 20 months since the first contest, I assume this AI will be even more challenging,” Les said.
The first contest had nearly 300,000 viewers on the live streaming site Twitch.
This year’s contest is called “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante.”
“Since the earliest days of AI research, beating top human players has been a powerful measure of progress in the field,” Sandholm said about the rematch. “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.”
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