Meet Cepheus: The first computer program to play a virtually flawless game of poker.

Developed at the University of Alberta in Canada, Cepheus (pronounced SEE-fee-us) plays heads-up limit Texas hold'em pokerand guarantees a win against human opponents.

"While Cepheus does not play perfectly, it is so close to perfect that even after playing an entire lifetime of poker against itover 60 million handsit is impossible to tell the difference," the poker project page said. "It is essentially perfect."

Given only the rules of the card game, and no human training, the software played against itself in a billion billion hands; more than 4,000 CPUs worked for two months to consider the outcome of every possible situation and learn every combination of variables in the game.

"Poker has been a challenge problem for artificial intelligence going back over 40 years, and until now, heads-up limit Texas hold'em poker was unsolved," lead author and UAlberta science professor Michael Bowling told the school news site.

The Canadian college's Computer Poker Research Group has been working for more than a decade to finalize Cepheus, which was named after the Cepehus constellation. Finishing touches were made by Bowling, PhD students Neil Burch and Michael Johanson, and Finnish software developer Oskari Tammelin.

The team's findings were then published in the Jan. 9 edition of Science.

"The breakthroughs behind this result are general algorithmic advances that make game-theoretic reasoning in large-scale models of any sort more tractable," Bowling said.

Advances like Cepheus could also be helpful in real-life decision-making settings, like airport check-ins, air marshall scheduling, and coast guard patrolling, the professor suggested.

Think you've got what it takes to beat artificial intelligence? Toss the sunglasses aside and take a seat opposite Cepheus in an online battle of man-versus-machine, which you will almost surely lose.

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