Poker in the mainstream media spotlight
The mainstream press has been creating a buzz out of AI’s infiltration of poker recently in light of next week’s Libratus win.
With the likelihood that we will see the Carnegie Mellon Artificial Intelligence bot Libratus emerge victorious against a team of poker professionals early next week, the game has been getting a chance to shine in the spotlight of the wider media.
As yet, no computer has beaten top players at No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, but with this set to change, the wider press have taken an interest in how things finish and what this could potentially mean.
The Washington Post, for example, this week ran with a featured piece on the students behind the bot and looked at what the fallout might be for other industries, even arms;
“The uses of the exercise go far beyond poker. War and cyberwar are both areas in which this could be useful”.
Gizmodo, too, was keen to propose wider uses for the new advancement;
“Libratus also represents a major step forward in the quest to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). Aside from being exceptional at one specific task, like playing chess or Go, artificial intelligence tends to be incredibly stupid on account of its narrow focus. AGI, on the other hand, is adaptable, flexible, and capable of learning all sorts of new information—like the rudiments of poker, or the finer details of commodities stock trading”.
Poker is the perfect model
Other titles, such as MIT Technology Review were at pains to point out what it was about poker precisely that made it such a good model with which to experiment;
“Poker requires reasoning and intelligence that has proven difficult for machines to imitate. It is fundamentally different from checkers, chess, or Go, because an opponent’s hand remains hidden from view during play. In games of “imperfect information,” it is enormously complicated to figure out the ideal strategy given every possible approach your opponent may be taking. And no-limit Texas Hold’em is especially challenging because an opponent could essentially bet any amount".
Fivethirtyeight have looked at the story from poker’s point of view and, unlike us, predicted a bleak future for the game after the bot’s inevitable victory;
“Should the humans fail in their contest against Libratus, it may spell the death of the very game they love. If a robot is better than even the best humans, why would a novice human attempt to master the game? Already, the community of heads-up no-limit players is dwindling”.
While Wired takes a moment to pay tribute to the people behind the bot;
“Humans are always changing it, as they push towards ever greater possibilities, and in many cases, they work right alongside it, because that’s often the best way of realizing those possibilities”.
Do you think aspects of the game will be affected after next week's result or will things carry on as normal?
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