Alan Du became the first player from mainland China to win a World Series of Poker bracelet last year, but his rare abilities weren’t enough to overcome the latest Artificial Intelligence machine to try its hand at poker.
On Monday, the results of a five day battle held on China’s Hainan island between Du’s six-man Team Dragons and “Lengpudashi” were announced with the machine scoring a crushing victory over the course of 36,000 hands. It follows a similar result in Pittsburgh last year when Libratus – an earlier version of Lengpudashi – scored a similarly lopsided win over four poker pros.
This time around Du surrounded himself not with poker players but engineers and entrepreneurs, including a former Oracle engineer, who had a strong grasp of machine intelligence and game theory. It didn’t work.
Tuomas Sandholm, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and the man behind Lengpudashi’s capabilities, said that a machine was much better equipped than a person to prevail in battles of game theory.
“The best AI’s ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans,” Sandholm told Central Michigan University News. It was also game theory from which Lengpudashi learned to bluff.
“Its strategies were computed from just the rules of the game” and not from analyzing historical data, Sandholm added.
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