In a casino in Pittsburgh, an AI program is beating poker champions for the first time

The night before his newest poker competition was set to begin, Carnegie Mellon's Tuomas Sandholm and his PhD student Noam Brown sat down to play a little No Limit Texas Hold'em against the main competition: the artificial intelligence program they designed called "Libratus." "I was totally wrecked," Sandholm told The Washington Post. But he is not a serious poker player, so that's not such a big achievement. For the past 13 days, however, Libratus has been facing off against four world-champion poker players in a Pittsburgh casino. If it can beat them like it beat Sandholm, it would be an enormous breakthrough.