Inside Libratus, the Poker AI That Out-Bluffed the Best Humans

For almost three weeks, Dong Kim sat at a casino in Pittsburgh and played poker against a machine. Kim, 28, is among the best players in the world. The machine, built by two computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon, is an artificially intelligent system that runs on a Pittsburg supercomputer. And for twenty straight days, they played no-limit Texas Hold'Em, an especially complex form of poker in which betting strategies play out over dozens of hands. About halfway through the competition, which ended this week, Kim started to feel like Libratus could see his cards.