Four of the best poker players in the U.S. try to avenge a defeat of another poker team at the hands of a poker playing artificial intelligence (AI) program by testing their wits against a new and more powerful AI named "Claudico".

The newest poker challenge pitting man against AI will take place April 24, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., Eastern U.S. time, at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. This game, the first in a series that will take place almost daily until May 7, can be viewed on a delayed stream here.

Like Us on Facebook

Defending the human race against the machine will be four professional poker players: Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les. Polk is considered the world's best poker player. Kim, Li and Les are among the top 10 poker pros. Texas Hold'em is largely played online.

The competition, billed as "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence" will be the first of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em to be played against Claudico, a software program developed specifically to beat humans at poker.

Brains vs. AI is the first time a computer program has played Heads-up No-limit Texas Hold'em in competition with top human players.

Claudico, which means "limp" in Latin, was developed by a team from Carnegie Mellon University consisting of Tuomas Sandholm, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who led the development of Claudico along with his Ph.D. students, Sam Ganzfried and Noam Brown. In poker, limping means to get into a hand by calling rather than raising or folding.

The Claudico team used the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Blacklight supercomputer to compute Claudico's strategy. Blacklight has 16 trillion bytes of RAM or 8,000 times more memory than the most powerful tablet computer. Claudico will use Blacklight during the event as it battles against the humans.

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.

Two pros will play on the casino main floor and two will play in an isolation room on the second floor. To reduce the role of luck, the pros in the isolation room will play the opposite hole cards against Claudico from the ones being played by the pros and Claudico on the main floor. The players will rotate periodically between the main floor and isolation room.

Play is scheduled to begin each day at 11:00 a.m. beginning April 25 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.

Even if a pro beats Claudico one-on-one, that doesn't mean much in determining whether a computer can outperform a human in a game with as much randomness as poker.

If the final chip totals are very close, it's possible that Claudico and the pros will reach a statistical tie, in which case the competition will be declared a draw.

Claudico performs real-time reasoning during a hand. The research team built Claudico using algorithms that analyzed poker rules to devise a winning strategy. Claudico is not based on the experience of expert human players, so its strategy for playing can differ markedly from seasoned pros.

Carnegie Mellon is a leading center in artificial intelligence research, creating computer chess programs that led to the Deep Blue program that defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, aiding in the development of Watson, which defeated Jeopardy! champions in 2011.

The pros will receive appearance fees derived from a prize purse of $100,000 donated by Microsoft Research and Rivers Casino.

"I think it's a 50-50 proposition," Sandholm said of Claudico's chances. "I think there's a good chance we'll lose this thing." 

Sandholm said two-player no-limit Hold'em has 10¹⁶¹ (1 followed by 161 zeroes) situations, or information sets a player may face. That's a lot more than all of the atoms in the universe. By contrast, the easier game of limit Hold'em, in which bets and raises are limited to a pre-determined amount, has only 10¹³ (1 followed by 13 zeroes) information sets.

"I imagine that the humans have an edge here," Polk said, citing the extraordinary programming challenge for a no-limit game. "However, it is very difficult to determine an outcome with any sort of stability, as I do not know what I am going to be up against."