80,000 hands of Heads-Up No-limit Texas Hold’em will be played in a two-week contest. Who will come out on top?

In a contest that echoes Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov and Watson beating two Jeopardy! Champions, computer poker software developed at Carnegie Mellon University will challenge four of the world’s best professional poker players in a “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence” competition beginning April 24 at Rivers Casino.

Over the course of two weeks, the CMU computer program, Claudico, will play 20,000 hands of Heads-Up No-limit Texas Hold’em with each of the four poker pros. The pros – Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les – will receive appearance fees derived from a prize purse of $100,000 donated by Microsoft Research and by Rivers Casino. The Carnegie Mellon scientists will compete for something more precious.

“Poker is now a benchmark for artificial intelligence research, just as chess once was,” said Tuomas Sandholm, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who has led development of Claudico. “It’s a game of exceeding complexity that requires a machine to make decisions based on incomplete and often misleading information, thanks to bluffing, slow play and other decoys. And to win, the machine has to out-smart its human opponents.”

“Computing the world’s strongest strategies for this game was a major achievement – with the algorithms having future applications in business, military, cybersecurity and medical arenas.”

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Though an earlier version of the computer program, called Tartanian7, decisively won the Heads-Up, No-limit Texas Hold’em category of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s Annual Computer Poker Competition last July, Sandholm said that doesn’t mean it necessarily is the equal of human players. Computers have demonstrated they can outplay humans at the simpler game of Heads-Up Limit Texas Hold’em, he noted, but not the far more complicated no-limit version.