Later this week a $200,000 tournament will pit an AI system built by Carnegie Mellon University against four of the world’s top pros in the game of No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker. The team from CMU was hoping to be the first to lay claim to an AI that could defeat the best humans in the world at the game. But a rival academic outfit claims to have just beaten them to the punch.
A group from the University of Alberta, in partnership with two Czech universities, has made public a paper on DeepStack, an AI system that it believes is the first to consistently beat professional players at this extremely popular and challenging game. It’s important to note that the paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But the team behind it has a history of accomplishments in the space that lend credence to its claims.
There’s no limit to what these bots can do
In 2008 a group with many of the same researchers devised the first system that could beat top-level humans at Limit Texas Hold’em, a version of the game that has a far more constrained variety of possible bets. In 2015 that team laid claim to a system that played a near perfect version of Limit Hold’em.
In heads-up play, DeepStack was matched against 33 professional players from the International Federation of Poker. Over the course of 44,852 hands, the paper claims the program bested its human opponents by a wide margin. “Over all games played, DeepStack won 492 mbb/g. This is over 4 standard deviations away from zero, and so highly significant. Note that professional poker players consider 50 mbb/g a sizable margin,” the DeepStack team wrote.