Oh the humanity! Poker computer trounces humans in big step for AI

Every day for the last 20 days, between the hours of 11am and about 10pm, four of the world's top poker players have been sitting in a Pittsburgh casino playing against a software robot called Libratus. With only a few hours of the Brains vs Artifical Intelligence competition left, Libratus has won more than $1.5m worth of chips from the humans. It would take a miracle for the human players, Dong Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McCauley – all specialists in no-limit Texas Hold'em, a two-player unlimited bid form of poker – to make a comeback. Machines have already become smart enough to beat humans at other games such as chess and Go, but poker is more difficult because it's a game with imperfect information. With chess and Go, each player can see the entire board, but with poker, players don't get to see each other's hands.