Update: Last time AI took on humans at poker, the flesh-and-blood brigade won comfortably. Libratus has won $1,766,250 worth of chips at no-limit Texas Hold'em, knocking the stuffing out of its four human opponents in the process. "Yeah, this was a beat-down," was all human opponent Jimmy Chou could say after finishing his 30,000th hand on Monday. Libratus' co-creator, PhD student Noam Brown, was delighted with the AI's performance, telling The Guardian, "When I see the bot bluff the humans, I'm like, 'I didn't tell it to do that. I had no idea it was even capable of doing that.' It's satisfying to know I created something that can do that."

Can an AI beat the world's best players at poker? In 2015, the answer was no, but computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have a new AI that's ready to step up to the table in a 20 day "Brains vs Artificial Intelligence" match at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. The AI – known as Libratus – is the successor to Claudico, the AI that lost in a similar tournament two years ago. Since then, AIs have increasingly been getting the upper hand over humans, with Google DeepMind managing to beat the human Go champion 4-1 back in March. Libratus has learned the rules of the game with over 15 million hours of computation.