Could AlphaGo Bluff Its Way through Poker?

One of the scientists responsible for AlphaGo, the Google DeepMind software that trounced one of the world's best Go players recently, says the same approach can produce a surprisingly competent poker bot. Unlike board games such as Go or chess, poker is a game of "imperfect information," and for this reason it has proved even more resistant to computerization than Go. Gameplay in poker involves devising a strategy based on the cards you have in your hand and a guess as to what's in your opponents' hands. Poker players try to read the behavior of others at the table using a combination of statistics and more subtle behavioral cues. Because of this, building an effective poker bot using machine learning may be significant for real-world applications of AI.