In 2017, a poker bot called Libratus made headlines when it roundly defeated four top human players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. Now, Libratus’ technology is being adapted to take on opponents of a different kind—in service of the US military.

Libratus—Latin for balanced—was created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to test ideas for automated decisionmaking based on game theory. Early last year, the professor who led the project, Tuomas Sandholm, founded a startup called Strategy Robot to adapt his lab's game-playing technology for government use, such as in war games and simulations used to explore military strategy and planning. Late in August, public records show, the company received a two-year contract of up to $10 million with the US Army. It is described as “in support of” a Pentagon agency called the Defense Innovation Unit, created in 2015 to woo Silicon Valley and speed US military adoption of new technology.

Libratus’ defeat of poker pros in 2017 was seen as a milestone in AI because the card game has complex features lacking in the board games most prominently mastered by computers. In chess and Go, every piece is exposed for both players to see, making them what are called perfect information games. In poker, not all cards are visible, meaning that—as in many real-life scenarios—some information needed to calculate the true state of play is unknown.

Libratus was built on a technology called computational game theory. It won more than $1.8 million in play money from the poker champions by calculating how they might respond to its decisions. The software devised powerful betting strategies and even showed the ability to bluff.

Sandholm says that approach can be applied to many other games, and also military simulations. War-gaming exercises typically test only small numbers of strategies for imagined opponents, even when run as computer simulations, he says. “That opens yourself up to a lot of exploitation, because the real adversary may not play according to your assumptions,” Sandholm says.

Sandholm declines to discuss specifics of Strategy Robot’s projects, which include at least one other government contract. He says it can tackle simulations that involve making decisions in a simulated physical space, such as where to place military units. The Defense Innovation Unit declined to comment on the project, and the Army did not respond to requests for comment.

Libratus’ poker technique suggests Strategy Robot might deliver military personnel some surprising recommendations. Pro players who took on the bot found that it flipped unnervingly between tame and hyperaggressive tactics, all the while relentlessly notching up wins as it calculated paths to victory. “It's weird because it doesn't seem that it overwhelms you, but then you look at the score and you realize what's happened,” Sandholm says.

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Greg Allen, an adjunct fellow at think tank the Center for a New American Security, says the type of technology that powered Libratus could make war-gaming and simulation exercises more useful. “It’s still far from real, but it’s a better proxy for the real world,” he says. All the same, the results will likely remain just one component of strategy planning and research, he says, because the world is much more complex and messy than the scenarios even the best AI technology can master.

Strategy Robot isn’t the Pentagon’s only new foray into AI-enhanced game theory. Its research agency Darpa is starting a program to explore how the technology can be applied to military decisionmaking. Michael Wellman, a professor at the University of Michigan, says his group is working on applying computational game theory to cybersecurity under that program. He says Libratus can be seen as a sign that the technology is maturing. “It really is time to try this in some more real domains,” he says. “The breakthrough in poker was just so striking, and things are going quickly with other games.”