Doug Polk and the humans beat the Bot
A team of four of the best HUNL players in poker have beaten an Artifical Intelligence program from Carnegie Mellon University.
The fascinating battle between four poker pros and heads-up bot 'Claudico' has ended, with the humans prevailing.
The team of Doug Polk, Bjorn Li, Jason Les and Dong Kim challenged the Artifical Intelligence program from Carnegie Mellon University to 80,000 hands of Heads-Up No Limit Hold'em, all of which was streamed live on Twitch.
Many were concerned that this would be a poker version of when chess bot 'Deep Blue' beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov, however this time the humans won by $732,713.
Bjorn Li won by $529,033, Polk by $213,671, Kim by $70,491 and Les was the only player to lose to Claudico, to the tune of $80,482.
This was all 'Play Money' but the humans were rewarded with $100,000 shared between them in the form of an 'appearance fee'.
Tough, but not a 'top player'
Polk said after the match that Claudico was a tough opponent but by no means a 'top player', giving an example of some of its more unusual lines:
"There are spots where it plays well and others where I just don't understand it. Betting $19,000 to win a $700 pot just isn't something that a person would do."
Given that the $732,713 win represents a very small percentage of the overall bets wagered of $170 million in 'Play Money' the scientists at CMU have deemed this match a statistical 'tie'. However, as we poker players know, high stakes players make their living on very small edges like this.
"Beating humans isn't really our goal; it's just a milestone along the way," said Tuomas Sandholm of CMU. "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."
Do you agree with CMU that this is a 'statistical tie'? Did you expect the humans to win? Let us know in the comments.
