Champion bridge player Sharon Osberg once wrote, "Playing bridge is like running a business. While it's little surprise chess fell to number-crunching supercomputers long ago, you'd expect humans to maintain a more unassailable advantage in bridge, a game of incomplete information, cooperation, and sly communication. Over millennia, our brains have evolved to read subtle facial queues and body language. We've assembled sprawling societies dependent on the competition and cooperation of millions. Surely such skills are beyond the reach of machines? In recent years, the most advanced AI has begun encroaching on some of our most proudly held territory; the ability to navigate an uncertain world where information is limited, the game is infinitely nuanced, and no one succeeds alone. Last week, French startup NukkAI took another step when its NooK bridge-playing AI outplayed eight bridge world champions in a competition held in Paris. The game was simplified, and NooK didn't exactly go ...

Bill Gates famously described bridge as'one of the last games in which the computer is not better'. But the Microsoft co-founder will be eating his words this week, following the news that an artificial intelligence bot has managed to beat not just one, but eight world champion bridge players at the game. French startup NukkAI spent four years developing the AI bot, called NooK, which took home the crown at the two-day Nukkai Challenge in Paris last week. In bridge, each of the four players, split into two teams, receives 13 cards in a hand. While other AI systems are typically trained by playing billions of rounds of a game, NooK was trained using a hybrid approach.