After first week, A.I. system is beating human poker players

A third of the way through a 20-day man vs. machine poker tournament, the artificial intelligence system has the hot hand. As of Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. ET, the humans and the A.I. system, dubbed Libratus, had already played more than 34,000 hands with about 120,000 hands likely by the end of the tournament. The "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante" tournament kicked off Jan. 11 at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. During the tournament, poker pros Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou are playing Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em against Libratus. Libratus pulled ahead early, leading by a little more than $74,000 on the first day of play and by more than twice amount by Day 2. "This is quite nice given that in advance of the event the international betting sites considered us a 4:1 or 5:1 underdog," wrote Tuomas Sandholm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and lead developer on the Libratus system, in an email to Computerworld.