Humans beat an artificial intelligence (AI) program designed specifically to beat humans at Texas Hold'em poker during the first two days of a 14 day match that will see if an AI can defeat humans at poker.

The competition, billed as "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence", is the first Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em contest to be played against "Claudico", a software program developed specifically to play this kind of poker by a team from Carnegie Mellon University consisting of Tuomas Sandholm, a professor of computer science, and his Ph.D. students, Sam Ganzfried and Noam Brown.

Like Us on Facebook

Claudico lost to the human team of pro poker players Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les on Day 1 last April 24. Claudico was down $148,700 down at the end of the day during the contest being played at Pittsburgh's Rivers Casino.

After 8,000 hands, Claudico narrowed its losses to $115,427 on April 25. The games will be played online almost daily until May 7.

There will be 72,000 hands to be played between April 26 to May 8, and Claudico might still win against some or all of its human foes. But that doesn't look likely at the moment considering how the AI has done so far.

Each of the four pros will play 1,500 hands per day against Claudico over 13 days or until May 7. Extra hands played on the last day, May 7, to achieve a total of 80,000 hands.

The pros will play using standard laptop computers. Their laptops will be linked to a computer at Carnegie Mellon University running the Claudico program.

Play is scheduled to begin each day at 11:00 a.m. beginning April 24 and end at about 10:00 p.m., with breaks for the humans in between. The pros will take a day off on May 3. There will be a concluding ceremony on the morning of May 8 where the final results will be announced.

The winner will be determined by who has the most chips. Though the pros will each play one-on-one with Claudico, their chip totals will be combined as if they competed as a team in deciding the winner.

"Poker is now a benchmark for artificial intelligence research, just as chess once was. 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," said Sandholm.

While the human players are competing for a share of US$100,000 in prize money, the CMU developers have their minds set on proving their programming so it beat some of the best poker players on the planet. The prize money was donated by Microsoft Research and Rivers Casino.

Sandholm said having computers beat humans in poker has been their goal. He noted the numerous unknown variables in poker are the perfect test for an AI.

TagsPoker Computer to Beat Humans in Texas Hold 'Em, computer game, poker, texas hold em, gambling