Good news everyone! Humans are still smarter than computer, at least as far as playing Poker is involved… And only by an insignificant margin.
A 2 day heads-up no-limit Texas Hold’em battle between 4 of the world's best Poker players and a Carnegie Mellon University artificial intelligence program called Claudico ended up with the human players collectively beating the AI by $732,713.
The computer program played 20,000 hands against each of the 4 human players and ended up losing $529,033 to Bjorn Li, losing $213,671 to Doug Polk, losing $70, 491 Dong Kim and winning $80,482 from Jason Les. No actual wagering took place during the event, but the human players received appearance fees based on their performance from a prize pool of $100,000 donated by Rivers Casino and Microsoft Research.
Due to the large number of hands played, scientists found the human collective lead total to be statistically insignificant and decided that the match has ended in a statistical tie.
Poker is currently one of the most important tests of artificial intelligence since it involves taking decisions based on incomplete data and in an adversarial environment where players try to mislead their opponents by bluffs, calls and all sorts of mental tricks.
"Beating humans isn’t really our goal; it’s just a milestone along the way," said CMU professor Tuomas Sandholm. "What we want to do is create an artificial intelligence that can help humans negotiate or make decisions in situations where they can’t know all of the facts."
