Dahl’s game grew more unpredictable over time, as the neural nets learned. Eventually, it got to the point where, over thousands of hands, they would each orchestrate the optimal number of bluffs; but in any one hand, the program might do anything. What’s more, a second neural net, which plays in a slightly different style, was introduced to reinforce the machine’s unpredictability; when an opponent has a reduced stack of chips, a third net takes over and plays in a manner customized for that situation. Like three tag-team fighters, the nets alternate against an opponent. At random moments, the machine’s mode of play might change the level of its aggressiveness.

By 2006, after thousands of neural nets, tweaked repeatedly, had played billions of hands, Dahl recruited gifted poker-playing friends to take on his game. It won frequently enough to hold up in a casino environment, he thought. Malcolm Davis then brought it to the attention of Bob Hamman, a frequent backgammon opponent of his and the bridge partner of Bill Gates.

Though Hamman ranks among the world’s top bridge players, he plays cards only as a hobby. He makes his living by insuring promotional contests (like those at company outings where attendees might win $10,000 for sinking a 30-foot putt, for example). Intrigued by the software’s potential, Hamman tested it against both other poker-playing programs and a young bridge master named Justin Lall. “Justin also happens to be a skilled poker player,” Hamman says. “He’s skilled enough that if you think you want to make a living playing against Justin, you might want to reconsider. He said it’s a good game. He found it captivating. He came close to beating it.”

Soon after, in October 2006, Hamman called Gregg Giuffria, a neighbor of Gates’s at the Del Mar Country Club in Southern California, where both had homes. Giuffria was once better known as a member of the hard-rock band Angel, but now he ran a company that made gambling machines. After a bit of small talk, Hamman told him about Dahl’s software. “It’s real smart,” he said. “I thought it was only interesting. But then you play against it and realize that it’s bluffing you. All of a sudden, you’re talking to steel and glass like it’s human.”

By the time Giuffria heard from Hamman, he had already wandered far from arena stages. He took the first step in 1990, 15 years after Angel’s first album came out, when he had a life-changing dinner with Lee Iacocca, the former Chrysler chairman. (Giuffria’s wife, April, knew Iacocca as a family friend.) “I thought I was not the dumbest guy at the table,” Giuffria says, “but the dumbest guy on the planet.” He suddenly saw himself as a 39-year-old “white boy chasing rock ‘n’ roll, with hip-hop coming in — it was time for me to reinvent myself.”

Days later, he cut his hair and, on the advice of Iaccoca, began analyzing patents that the Defense Department was allowing to be released to the public sector. The hope was that Giuffria would discover an unexploited business opportunity and maybe Iaccoca would partner with him to develop it. Giuffria came across a company called Summit Systems that held a patent for a mathematical process that had an application for slot machines. Iaccoca passed, so Giuffria used royalties from his music career to acquire rights to the patent from the moribund company and eventually helped sell them to International Game Technology, now the world’s largest manufacturer of slot machines. “In one afternoon,” Giuffria says, “I made more money from that patent than I had in 18 years of touring, writing songs and getting gold records with Angel.”

That success hooked Giuffria on the gambling industry. He and Iacocca collaborated on casino developments around the country. Later, Giuffria built a Hard Rock casino near New Orleans and got into creating gambling machines. “It’s all entertainment,” Giuffria says, when describing the transition from rocker to gaming entrepreneur.