Libratus poker AI beats several of the world's best players

In a first, an artificial intelligence named Libratus has bested top-tier players at no-limit Texas Hold 'em. This is especially notable because imperfect information games are notoriously challenging to program.

Tuomas Sandholm at Carnegie Mellon led the team. Via Wired:

Libratus, for one, did not use neural networks. Mainly, it relied on a form of AI known as reinforcement learning, a method of extreme trial-and-error. In essence, it played game after game against itself. Google's DeepMind lab used reinforcement learning in building AlphaGo, the system that that cracked the ancient game of Go ten years ahead of schedule, but there's a key difference between the two systems. AlphaGo learned the game by analyzing 30 million Go moves from human players, before refining its skills by playing against itself. By contrast, Libratus learned from scratch. Through an algorithm called counterfactual regret minimization, it began by playing at random, and eventually, after several months of training and trillions of hands of poker, it too reached a level where it could not just challenge the best humans but play in ways they couldn't—playing a much wider range of bets and randomizing these bets, so that rivals have more trouble guessing what cards it holds.

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