Texas Hold'em AI Bot Taps Deep Learning to Demolish Humans

A fresh Texas Hold'em-playing AI terror has emerged barely a month after a supercomputer-powered bot claimed victory over four professional poker players. But instead of relying on a supercomputer's hardware, the DeepStack AI has shown how it too can decisively defeat human poker pros while running on a GPU chip equivalent to those found in gaming laptops. The success of any poker-playing computer algorithm in heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold'em is no small feat. This version of two-player poker with unrestricted bet sizes has 10160 possible plays at different stages of the game--more than the number of atoms in the entire universe. But the Canadian and Czech reseachers who developed the new DeepStack algorithm leveraged deep learning technology to create the computer equivalent of intuition and reduce the possible future plays that needed to be calculated at any point in the game to just 107.