The last traditional game, No Limit Heads-Up Texas Hold'em, has conclusively fallen to AI supremacy, as
Libratus defeats four masters in a 20-day tournament by a whopping $1.5 million lead.
With only a few hours of the Brains vs Artifical Intelligence competition left, Libratus has won more than $1.5m worth of chips from the humans. It would take a miracle for the human players, Dong Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McCauley – all specialists in no-limit Texas Hold’em, a two-player unlimited bid form of poker – to make a comeback.
It’s a crushing defeat for humanity, but a major milestone for artificial intelligence.
The humans were paired up with duplicate hands in a configuration I don't completely understand, but apparently that along with the sheer number of hands played completely removed the "luck factor" from the challenge. This was solely a test of Libratus' ability to bluff and bet strategically, and it passed with flying colors:
“We didn’t tell Libratus how to play poker. We gave it the rules of poker and said ‘learn on your own’,” said Brown. The bot started playing randomly but over the course of playing trillions of hands was able to refine its approach and arrive at a winning strategy.
...
They have also learned from Libratus, thanks to the robot’s aggressive style of play that sees it make huge bets to win small prize pots.
“It’s just not something a human would normally do, but it forces you to be on your toes for each game,” said Les.
“It’s almost like we’ve been shellshocked into being much stronger players. Nothing anyone does will seem that crazy any more.”
For Brown, seeing Libratus win has induced a “proud parent feeling”.
“When I see the bot bluff the humans, I’m like, ‘I didn’t tell it to do that. I had no idea it was even capable of doing that.’ It’s satisfying to know I created something that can do that.”
Of course, nobody spends millions of dollars to build a machine
just to school humans at card games, there's real world implications here:
The algorithms that power Libratus aren’t specific to poker, which means the system could have a variety of applications outside of recreational games, from negotiating business deals to setting military or cybersecurity strategy and planning medical treatment – anywhere where humans are required to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information.
“Poker is the least of our concerns here,” said Roman V Yampolskiy, a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville. “You have a machine that can kick your ass in business and military applications. I’m worried about how humanity as a whole will deal with that.”
For Brown, Libratus challenges preconceptions about machine intelligence versus human intelligence.
“People have this idea that poker is a very human game and that bots can’t bluff, for example. That’s totally wrong. It’s not about reading your opponent and trying to tell if they are lying, it’s about the cards and probabilities,” he said.
Emphasis mine. I think that was the last of the Big traditional games AIs had yet to conquer. I think after this all that's left is video games, like Starcraft or Civilization. An AI here, an AI there, a bot for this task, a bot for that... algorithms and learning computers and roombas of all shapes and sizes rule the world now. When can I actually vote for Watson For President already? Hail Siliconia.
"Old World Blues.' It refers to those so obsessed with the past they can't see the present, much less the future, for what it is. They stare into the what-was...as the realities of their world continue on around them." -Fallout New Vegas
