Earlier this year, Libratus, an artificial intelligence, made headlines by besting poker champions from around the world in Texas Hold'Em. Astrophysicist and professional poker player Liv Boeree looks beyond the game to imagine how a supercomputer-driven AI can solve some of humanity's biggest problems. Invented by Carnegie Mellon professor Dr. Tuomas Sandholm and powered by HPE technology, Libratus is capable of much more than mastering a mathematically-complex card game. It has the potential to answer some of our most enduring and complex questions about the nature of the universe. This Great Big Story is a paid contribution by HPE (https://www.hpe.com/us/en/home.html).

Computer researchers are betting they can take on the house after designing a new artificial intelligence program that has beat professional poker players. Researchers from University of Alberta, Czech Technical University and Charles University in Prague developed the "DeepStack" program as a way to build artificial intelligence capable of playing a complex kind of poker. Creating an AI program that can win against a human player in a no-limit poker game has long been a goal of researchers due to the complexity of the game. Michael Bowling, a professor in the Department of Computing Science in the University of Alberta, explained that computers have been able to win at "perfect" games such as chess or Go, in which all the information is available to both players, but that "imperfect" games like poker have been much harder to program for. "This game [poker] embodies situations where you find yourself not having all the information you need to make a decision," said Bowling.

In 2012, a comic made its way around the internet listing games on a scale of how close they were to being dominated by artificial intelligence. Checkers and tic-tac-toe had already been conquered; chess's human champion had been dethroned, and IBM's Watson had taken no prisoners on Jeopardy. The "Computers may never outplay humans" section still had its stalwarts: Calvinball--the game in Bill Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes where the rules are made up on the fly--and Seven Minutes in Heaven. Just one step up, listed under "Computers still lose to top humans," were Chinese game Go and American pastime poker. Ph.D candidate Noam Brown is sitting next to a professional poker player closing out his 20th day of losing to Libratus, a poker-playing bot that Brown co-created at Carnegie Mellon University.

To be great at poker you gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to core dump. That's only part of the technique a new AI system created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to beat four of the "world's best professional poker players" – Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou, Daniel McAulay and Jason Les. The AI played the humans in a 20-day 120,000-hand Heads-up No-Limit Texas Hold'em binge that happened live on a casino floor in Pittsburgh. The AI, called Libratus, was up $1,766,250 in chips by the end of the experiment when it finally beat the four pros in a competition at Rivers Casino. The players played nearly constantly, conferring on strategy after each day of play.

The Steve Miller classic profoundly states that "you've got to know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em," and for the first time, an AI has out-gambled world-class players at heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold'em. Our representatives of humanity -- Jason Les, Dong Kyu Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou -- kept things relatively tight at the outset but a ill-fated shift in strategy wiped out their gains and forced them to chase the AI for the remaining weeks. At the end of day 20 and after 120,000 hands, Libratus claimed victory with daily total of $206,061 in theoretical chips and an overall pile of $1,766,250. "This is a landmark step for AI," said Libratus creator and Carnegie Mellon University professor Tuomas Sandholm in an email. "This is the first time that AI has been able to beat the best humans at Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em. More generally, this shows that the best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning under imperfect information has surpassed that of the best humans."

Today begins week three of the poker tournament between Libratus, an AI system built by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, and four of the world's top pros. While the humans plan to soldier on, a gallows humor has taken hold. With a little over 80,000 hands played, out of 120,000 total, the humans are down by roughly $750,000, a massive amount that will be all but impossible to come back from. "We're all down about the price of a small house," said Jason Les, chatting with onlookers about the score while he played. The players don't actually have to pay the AI anything, and in fact all get paid depending on how well they perform relative to one another. "It's not about the money, it's about preserving human dignity," quipped Les.