This Poker Playing AI Could Change the World
Video Credits: Great Big Story, YouTube
Artificial Intelligence (AI) never fails to surprise us. With its limitless possibilities and an extensive capacity to adapt and learn has always been a topic of curiosity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proven to extremely useful in many fields. As the scientists and researchers continue to expand what this technology is capable of, we are faced with a new capability every day.
Amongst many things that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can do, poker playing has been newly added. A poker playing bot was developed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and from Facebook’s AI lab. This Artificial Intelligence (AI) system was able to beat world’s top players in Texas Hold’em poker games.
This six player no limit is the world’s most popular form of poker. The name of this AI system developed is ‘Pluribus’. This AI system was developed by Tuomas Sandholm, Angel Jordan Professor of Computer Science and Noam Brown currently a PhD candidate from Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Department and a research scientist at Facebook AI.
Tuomas Sandholm while explaining the process of Pluribus says, “Pluribus achieved superhuman performance at multi-player poker, which is a recognized milestone in artificial intelligence and in game theory that has been open for decades. Thus far, superhuman AI milestones in strategic reasoning have been limited to two-party competition. The ability to beat five other players in such a complicated game opens up new opportunities to use AI to solve a wide variety of real-world problems.”
Pluribus learnt to play poker by playing with the copies of itself. This is known as common technique called self play which is generally employed in the training process of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pluribus was able to master the game of poker in mere 8 days. It did it with the help of a single powerful server with 64 processor cores equipped with less than 512GB of RAM.
Winning against humans is still considered to a milestone when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI) development. No computer program has been able to defeat a human so far. Pluribus was able to defeat one of the top players in the world for the poker game. At the end of the game the AI system was able to win a huge amount of $ 48,000.
Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu who is a professional poker player, speaking about the involvement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the game said, “The game of poker, the way it looked when I started playing in the late-’90s, is very different than what you see today. The advance of AI and different software programs you can use to figure out stuff that, in the past, old-school gamblers kind of just figured out by trial and error. Now there’s actual evidence of in this situation, this is what you should do. That never was around before. A lot of the top players at the very highest level use that to improve their game.”
Speaking about the ease of developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) services Noam Brown says that it can be easily developed with the help of a cloud computing serving for a small amount of $150. Due to this, such technology can be easily applied to the other domains.