How rival bots battled their way to poker supremacy

Top professional poker players have been been beaten by AI bots at no-limits hold'em. A complex variant of poker is the latest game to be mastered by artificial intelligence (AI). And it has been conquered not once, but twice, by two rival bots developed by separate research teams. Each algorithm -- which plays a'no limits' two-player version of Texas hold'em -- has in recent months hit a crucial AI milestone: they have beaten human professional players. The game first fell in December to DeepStack, developed by computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, with collaborators from Charles University and the Czech Technical University in Prague. A month later, Libratus, developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, achieved the feat.