A new poker playing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm named "Libratus" has finally succeeded in defeating human professionals at poker, a stunning accomplishment that illustrates an AI's capability to beat humans in strategic reasoning for the first time.

"Libratus," which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), bested a team of four professional poker player during a marathon 20-day poker competition that began Jan. 11 and ended Jan. 30 called "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante" at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh.

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Once the last of 120,000 hands of Heads-up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em was played, Libratus was ahead of the humans by $1,766,250 in chips.

It was a revenge of sorts for the CMU team led by Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science, who from April 24 to May 7, 2015 pitted an AI named "Claudico" against four poker pros and lost.

"The best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans," said Sandholm.

Libratus' victory, the first by a poker playing AI over humans, is being hailed as a milestone in AI.

 "The computer can't win at poker if it can't bluff," said Frank Pfenning, head of the Computer Science Department at CMU's School of Computer Science.

"Developing an AI that can do that successfully is a tremendous step forward scientifically and has numerous applications. Imagine that your smartphone will someday be able to negotiate the best price on a new car for you. That's just the beginning."

Sundholm was assisted by Noam Brown, a Ph.D. student in computer science. Sundholm and Brown were part of the three man team that developed Claudico. The third man was Sam Ganzfried.

In 2015, Claudico took on and lost against a team consisting of Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les. Polk is considered the world's best poker player at the time.

The tournament, "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence," was the first Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em contest where an AI, Claudico, which was developed specifically to beat humans at poker.

This time around, however, the CMU team showed it had learned more than a lot from Claudico's defeat in 2015.

The poker pros this time around consisted of Dong Kim (again), Jason Les (again), Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay.  The guys split a $200,000 prize purse based on their respective performances during the event.

Libratus' victory was made possible by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Bridges computer on which the AI was housed. Bridges total speed comes to 1.35 petaflops.

Libratus profited from the immense power of 600 of Bridges' 846 computer nodes to think the way it did. This computing power gave Libratus the ability to play four of the best Texas Hold'em players in the world at once and beat them.

TagsArtificial Intelligence, AI, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ant, Heads-up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker, Tuomas Sandholm