How a poker-playing AI is learning to negotiate better than any human

In 2012, a comic made its way around the internet listing games on a scale of how close they were to being dominated by artificial intelligence. Checkers and tic-tac-toe had already been conquered; chess's human champion had been dethroned, and IBM's Watson had taken no prisoners on Jeopardy. The "Computers may never outplay humans" section still had its stalwarts: Calvinball--the game in Bill Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes where the rules are made up on the fly--and Seven Minutes in Heaven. Just one step up, listed under "Computers still lose to top humans," were Chinese game Go and American pastime poker. Ph.D candidate Noam Brown is sitting next to a professional poker player closing out his 20th day of losing to Libratus, a poker-playing bot that Brown co-created at Carnegie Mellon University.