Facebook and CMU's poker AI beat five pros at once (archive)
Facebook and Carnegie Mellon University have built another artificial intelligence bot that beat some top poker pros. While AI bots have been [able] to best professional players in one-on-one competition, Facebook claims it's the first time a bot has been able to beat top pros in "any major benchmark game" when there's more than one opponent at a time. Pluribus bested professionals in no-limit Texas Hold'em in a couple of different formats: five AI bots and one human, and one bot and five real-life players. The researchers behind Pluribus wrote in a paper published in Science that creating such a multiplayer poker bot "is a recognized AI milestone."
In the likes of chess and Go, everything is laid out in the open. But in poker, there's hidden information, namely the cards your opponents have. That brings different, complex strategies to poker not seen in other games, including bluffing. As such, AI bots have typically struggled to account for hidden information and effectively act on it.
Bluffing poses a particularly interesting challenge. A successful bluff can dramatically change a poker game in your favor, but do it too much and your deception becomes predictable. So the bot has to balance bluffing with betting on legitimately strong hands.
Also at BBC, The Verge, Ars Technica, and Facebook.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Saturday July 13 2019, @01:45PM
Forty seconds per hand sounds really long, but maybe that’s why I could never watch the pros play on TV. Taking that long, you’d be chased away from the average private game or casino table.
Why the heck is the graph in the article showing what seems to be mean, upper and lower limits?
What’s the RNG source that generates hands? Does 10000 hands mean that you have a very high level of confidence that every player got an approximately equal number of winning hands relative to the margin by which the AI won? How are stakes handled? Did human players successively bust out, or was the win more statistical in nature?