Carnegie Mellon Reveals Inner Workings of Victorious AI

Libratus AI Defeated Top Pros in 20 Days of Poker Play. Libratus, an artificial intelligence that defeated four top professional poker players in no-limit Texas Hold'em earlier this year, uses a three-pronged approach to master a game with more decision points than atoms in the universe, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University report. Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science, and Noam Brown, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department , detail how their AI achieved superhuman performance by breaking the game into computationally manageable parts and, based on its opponents' game play, fix potential weaknesses in its strategy during the competition. AI programs have defeated top humans in checkers, chess and Go - all challenging games, but ones in which both players know the exact state of the game at all times. Poker players, by contrast, contend with hidden information: what cards their opponents hold and whether an opponent is bluffing. In a 20-day competition involving 120,000 hands at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh this past January, Libratus became the first AI to defeat top human players at Head's-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em - the primary benchmark and longstanding challenge problem for imperfect-information game-solving by AIs.