AI Is Taking on Human Poker Champs to Prove a Very Big Point

A very interesting contest is taking place at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh where four of the world's best poker players are playing against a machine. And as of now anyway, the machine is winning. In this case the machine, named Libratus, is using artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed at nearby Carnegie Mellon University, a hot bed of AI and robotics research. The tournament kicked off Wednesday with odds makers favoring the human players 4 or 5 to 1 over Libratus. "But we ended up ahead," Tuomas Sandholm, CMU professor of computer science told Fortune over the phone, sounding delighted.