Updated Poker Machine To Take On Poker Players In $290,000 Winner-Take-All GameThe 36,000-Hand Exhibition Will Take Place April 6-10 |
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Forget fake chips, time for the real money.
After crushing four elite poker pros in an historic January heads-up no-limit hold’em competition to the tune of more than 14 big blinds per 100 hands, Carnegie Mellon University’s updated poker machine Libratus has a new set of opponents, as well as a new name.
Libratus was able to defeat the poker pros at a Pittsburgh casino by about 1.7 million chips, but they didn’t have any cash value. The poker pros split $200,000 for participating in a grueling 120,000-hand match over nearly three weeks.
This time around the machine, dubbed Lengpudashi, which means “cold poker master,” will play poker players in China for a winner-take-all prize of $290,000.
The exhibition will take place April 6-10 in Hainan, with 36,000 hands being dealt two at a time to each of the human players. Led by 2016 WSOP bracelet winner Alan Du, Team Dragons will try to spoil a breakout year for the artificial intelligence poker bot.
“I am very excited to take this new kind of AI technology to China,” said Tuomas Sandholm, CMU professor of computer science and co-creator of Lengpudashi. “I want to explore various commercial opportunities for this in poker and a host of other application areas."
Sandholm stressed that because this upcoming match only has 36,000 hands, it is possible the poker bot will lose. “This is an exhibition, not a match, challenge or competition,” he said. “We are running a relatively small number of hands, so this is not a scientific experiment.”
An earlier version of CMU’s bot lost to its human opponents in 2015. That team included Doug Polk, widely regarded as the top heads-up player in the world.
As was the case in the “Brains vs. AI” match with Libratus, the Lengpudashi AI will run via the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges computer during the event.
Noam Brown, a Ph.D. student who co-created the AI, said in a February interview with Card Player that the bot could soon be winning at more than just heads-up no-limit hold’em.
“I think that for now six-max is a little bit beyond the abilities of Libratus and similar AIs,” Brown admitted. “That said, the annual computer poker competition is adding a six-player league going forward, so 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.”
But for now, the CMU machine will stick to battling it out in one-on-one poker.
Late last year, another poker bot called DeepStack beat 10 out of 11 human opponents at heads-up no-limit hold’em. That AI was from computer scientists at the University of Alberta, Czech Technical University and Charles University in Prague.
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