An Artificial Intelligence Program Just Beat 5 Poker Professionals In a Texas Hold'em Tournament

A new artificial intelligence program the company built with Carnegie Mellon University called Pluribus recently beat five poker professionals in a six-player Texas Hold'em tournament. After 10,000 hands, the system averaged profits of about $1,000 per hour using $1 chips, a "decisive margin of victory," according to a Facebook blog post. AI has been besting humans at poker for a couple of years, but previous programs could compete with just a single player at a time. Given the complexities that come with poker, including techniques like bluffing, beating five humans in a single game is a significant milestone, Facebook said. "No other game embodies the challenge of hidden information quite like poker, where each player has information (his or her cards) that the others lack," Facebook wrote in a blog post.