New York: Poker players, get set to lose millions to a bot! In a first, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) programme developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with Facebook AI has defeated leading professionals in a six-player poker. The AI, called “Pluribus”, defeated poker professional Darren Elias who holds the record for most “World Poker Tour” titles, and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, winner of six “World Series of Poker” events at “no-limit Texas hold’em” — the world’s most popular form of poker.
Each professional separately played 5,000 hands of poker against five copies of Pluribus. In another experiment involving 13 pros, all of whom have won more than $1 million playing poker, Pluribus played five pros at a time for a total of 10,000 hands and again emerged victorious. “Pluribus achieved super-human performance at multi-player poker, which is a recognized milestone in AI and in game theory that has been open for decades,” said Tuomas Sandholm, Angel Jordan Professor of Computer Science, who developed Pluribus with Noam Brown, who is finishing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon as a research scientist at Facebook AI. (IANS)