Humans fold as AI comes up aces in poker competition

This should be a terrifying thought, but it's a breakthrough moment, watched by thousands of people across 151 countries on the Twitch network, all of them witness to the first time a computer artificial intelligence (AI), Libratus, soundly beat four of the world's best poker players at heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'Em. "At a high level, this means now that we have proven the ability for an AI to do strategic reasoning in imperfect situations has surpassed that of humans," said Carnegie Mellon University Professor of Computer Science Tuomas Sandholm on Tuesday during a press conference following the AI victory at Rivers Casino "Brains Vs. Backed by 600 nodes from the Pittsburgh Super Computer Center Bridge's computer, Libratus played 200 hundred hours of poker over 20 days against four poker pros: Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou, Daniel McAulay and Jason Les. Nearly two years after its predecessor, Claudico, lost almost a three-quarters of a million dollars in chips in a similar competition, Libratus won decisively by more than $1.7 million chips (no actually payouts were made during this competition; the four human players split a $200,000 purse). Winning aside, the accomplishment may be remembered as a turning point in the annals of AI. While previous AIs have already beaten human pros in games like chess and, more recently, Go, these games are essentially tests of an AI's raw computing power.