Lengpudashi, the "Cold Poker Master," arrived in Hainan to face the top Texas Hold'Em players in China for a USD 290,000 winner-takes-all purse. His opponents were serious players -- Team Dragons was led by Yue (Alan) Du, a venture capitalist and amateur player who was the first Chinese mainlander to win a trophy at the World Series of Poker. But none of them was a match for Lengpudashi, an artificial intelligence bot developed by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. The event, organized by former Greater China President of Google and venture capitalist Kai-fu Lee, followed anearlier showdown in January where Lengpudashi's older version Libratus beat four of the world's top poker professionals in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unlike Google's AlphaGo's triumph over 18-time world champion Lee Sedol last year, there was not so much fanfare in this event.

On a tropical island that marks the southern tip of China, a computer program called Lengpudashi is playing one-on-one poker against a dozen people at once, and it's absolutely crushing them. Lengpudashi, which means "cold poker master" in Mandarin, is using a new artificial-intelligence technique to outbet and outbluff its opponents in a two-player version of Texas hold'em. The venue for the tournament is a modern-looking technology park in Haikou, capital of the island of Hainan. Outside, modern high-rises loom over aging neighborhoods. Those gathered to play the machine include several poker champs, some well-known Chinese investors, entrepreneurs, and CEOs, and even the odd television celebrity.

In recent decades, a booming manufacturing sector--and market reforms encouraging foreign trade and investment--have helped bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, creating business empires and transforming Chinese society. The plan calls for homegrown AI to match that developed in the West within three years, for China's researchers to be making "major breakthroughs" by 2025, and for Chinese AI to be the envy of the world by 2030. "When the Chinese government announces a plan like this, it has significant implications for the country and the economy," says Andrew Ng, a prominent AI expert who previously oversaw AI technology and strategy at China's biggest online search company, Baidu. The country's tech companies, led by the Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, are hiring scores of AI experts, building new research centers, and investing in data centers that rival anything operated by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.

On a tropical island that marks the southern tip of China, a computer program called Lengpudashi is playing one-on-one poker against a dozen people at once, and it's absolutely crushing them. Lengpudashi, which means "cold poker master" in Mandarin, is using a new artificial-intelligence technique to outbet and outbluff its opponents in a two-player version of Texas hold'em. The venue for the tournament is a modern-looking technology park in Haikou, capital of the island of Hainan. Outside, modern high-rises loom over aging neighborhoods. Those gathered to play the machine include several poker champs, some well-known Chinese investors, entrepreneurs, and CEOs, and even the odd television celebrity. The games are being broadcast online, and millions are watching. The event symbolizes a growing sense of excitement and enthusiasm for artificial intelligence in China, but there's also a problem. Lengpudashi wasn't made in Hainan, Beijing, or Shanghai; it was built in Pittsburgh, U.S.A.

Libratus, the poker-playing AI that crushed four world-class pros in January, has put another group of human players to shame. This time, the upgraded variant of the AI known as "Lengpudashi" or "cold poker master" took on World Series veteran Alan Du and a team of engineers, computer scientists and investors. Instead of using pure poker skills to try and defeat Lengpudashi like the first team did, the new players applied what they know about machine learning to their game. Alas, their strategy didn't work, and the AI still won by a landslide after playing 36,000 hands against the team at a resort on China's Hainan island.

Your mother was right: you are special. While each of us is a perfect little snowflake in our own right, that doesn't necessarily mean we possess world-shaking skills. But back in the lab, data scientists are cranking out algorithms that exceed human capability on a regular basis. About a year ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) would generally surpass humans in core sensory capabilities (like seeing and hearing) in about five to 10 years. AI still can't "actually look at the photo and deeply understand what's in it or look at the videos and understand what's in it," he said at the time.

Last week a team of poker players in China were resoundingly defeated by "Lengpudashi". Meaning "cold poker master", Lengpudashi is the new, even more improved version of the Libratus AI (Artificial Intelligence) programme that I wrote about back in January. Not surprisingly, this latest AI victory has been big news: people have worried for years that robots equipped with AI will take over human jobs. Now not even poker is safe. Though computer programmes long ago proved their superiority in the classic skill game of chess, until now the bluffing and intuitive elements of poker – its very human elements – had made it hard for a machine to master.

An artificial intelligence program has beaten a team of six poker players at a series of exhibition matches in China. The AI system, called Lengpudashi, won a landslide victory and $290,000 (£230,000) in the five-day competition. It is the second time this year that an AI program has beaten competitive poker players. An earlier version of the program, known as Libratus, beat four of the world's best poker pros during a 20-day game in January. The AI systems were the work of Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, and PhD student Noam Brown.

Libratus, the poker-playing AI that crushed four world-class pros in January, has put another group of human players to shame. This time, the upgraded variant of the AI known as "Lengpudashi" or "cold poker master" took on World Series veteran Alan Du and a team of engineers, computer scientists and investors. Instead of using pure poker skills to try and defeat Lengpudashi like the first team did, the new players applied what they know about machine learning to their game. Alas, their strategy didn't work, and the AI still won by a landslide after playing 36,000 hands against the team at a resort on China's Hainan island. Unlike go, chess and other games AI play, you don't see your opponent's hand in poker.

As expected, the latest poker-playing bot powered by an artificial intelligence designed by a duo from Carnegie Mellon University beat a team of some of the best poker players in China. Lengpudashi, the AI developed by Professor Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown, a graduate student at CMU, finished five days of Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em with nearly $800,000 in chips and walked away with $290,000. "We all knew the outcome. There was little chance for the humans," said Kai-Fu Lee, head of Sinovation Ventures, a Chinese venture capital firm that organized the winner-take-all exhibition match in Hainan, China. Lee, himself a CMU alum who worked on speech recognition in Pittsburgh in the 1990s, challenged Lengpudashi to about 30 hands in a celebrity match during the exhibition.