Libratus, an artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Melon University, competes with team of professional poker players in a showdown named "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence." The professional poker players are: Dong Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay. The four compete with the AI in a No-Limit Texas Hold'em for 120,000 hands.
When the contest started in January 11th, the AI has managed to keep an impressive lead over its human opponents. Chou who is one of the professional players, regards the machine as a tremendously tough rival, noting the computer's ability to continuously improve its game.
"The bot gets better and better every day," he said. "It's like a tougher version of us."
The match happens at River Casino everyday from January 11th to 30th.
Libratus was developed by computer science professor Tuomas Sandholm and his PhD student Noam Brown. It was first debuted in 2015, and has edged out professionals in the game of poker. However, the AI was unable to turn a profit against its human opponents.
The 2017's Libratus uses strategy that isn't based on the experience of human players. By using algorithms to analyze the rules, it sets its own strategy based on its approximately 15 million core hours of computation at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).
As an AI, Libratus continuously sharpen its skills as it learns and adapt to the game.
Libratus' ability to reason is not just specific to poker. It's said that it can face and solve incomplete or misleading information, like for example: business negotiation, medicine, cybersecurity and more.
Libratus is just another AI from Carnegie Melon University. It's seen as a family in which the DNA can be traced back to Deep Blue that defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, the Watson AI that won the Jeopardy! champions in 2011, and Apple’s Siri digital assistant.
