So you may have heard of “Libratus” this was Carnegie Melon University’s Poker Bot that beat some of the best Heads Up Poker players in the world over days of play.
Focussed on beating one player at a time in heads up play, this was just the beginning of the journey into Poker AI.
The new bigger brother is called “Pluribus” and this Bot can not just take on one world-class player at a time, but can beat 6 Handed games!
CMU has developed this with Professor Tuomas Sandholm leading the charge but their hopes aren’t for this bot to simply be focused on Poker moving forward, Poker is just a good example of how it can adjust to imperfect information and use machine learning to adjust and improve in situations of all kinds.
Poker is a game of hidden information, so it’s perfect for those exploring the world of AI because no other game is like this!
Jason Les, Jimmy Chou, Michael Gagliano, Seth Davies, Trevor Savage and Chris Ferguson all participated in the testing of the bot and to make sure they were playing their A-game, they were playing for their share in real cash with $50,000 on the line.
Crazy hands
It’s as if the AI has been down every game tree that has ever existed and by the time it gets to the hand in question it probably has, acting out just as you might see solvers come up with crazy lines for hands a certain percentage of the time this Bot finds ways to win huge pots that nearly no one else would find, take a look at this video where the players get 100% owned in 3 big pots and remember, these are no ordinary players, these are the worlds best!
The AI does what can be simplified into playing hands against itself, so it will basically take an example hand and try and work out a better game plan that it could have implemented to get a better result and then it will learn that method and look to implement it. Pretty scary stuff.
Jimmy Chou sums up why playing the bot was so hard; “Whenever playing the bot, I feel like I pick up something new to incorporate into my game. As humans I think we tend to oversimplify the game for ourselves, making strategies easier to adopt and remember. The bot doesn’t take any of these shortcuts and has an immensely complicated/balanced game tree for every decision.”
With that being said, if you are serious about your no-limit game it’s worth taking a look at all the hands you can find on the internet and witnessing the thought process behind each line the bot takes, as some of them are simply groundbreaking.
Results Are In
The result of the first test was in, where all 5 Human players play the AI at one table and after 10,000 hands played over 12 days against some of the best Pros in the world the Bot was the winner, bagging around 5BBs per 100 Hands. So in dollar value, the Bot was winning around $1,000 an hour!
Now it was time for the second test where 5AIs would face off against 1 Human player at a time…
Linus Loeliger joined for this part, known online as LinusLove, he is a feared 6Max cash game player that has probably done the most work on this format and is the biggest online winner by a mile but even he was a slight loser in the game, losing around 0.5BB/100. On aggregate, the Pros lost by 2.3BB/100 hands.
All of this is performed on just 2 CPUs with less than 128GB of memory and around $150 worth of online cloud storage… the future is certainly looking like AI will be used for nearly everything.
The creators state that this research can be applied to fields such as fraud prevention cybersecurity and other fields that involve hidden information much in the same way that Poker does.
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