AI Bots Are Beating The World's Best Poker Players: VICE News Tonight on HBO

[snooper2]

Published on Feb 13, 2017
What’s it like to play poker against an AI bot? Really weird and really difficult, it turns out.

That was the vibe when we checked in on the 20-day “Brains vs. AI: Re-Match” in Pittsburgh, which pits four professional poker players against a Carnegie Mellon University-designed bot named Libratus.

Computer scientists at the university had tried this stunt with a bot named Claudico in 2015, but the humans picked up on its weird machine weaknesses and beat it soundly. So the scientists went back to the lab and rewrote its algorithm in a few key areas to make it unbeatable.

Their work paid off.

On Jan. 30, Libratus made history by trouncing the humans in a marathon 120,000 hands, coming out on top by $1,766,250 in chips — and pretty much killing it every day before that. The humans ended their inglorious run by splitting shares of a $200,000 prize.

The bot’s win has numerous implications for any field where decision-making is based on incomplete, or hidden, information. Or straight-up misinformation. Fields where people are forced to think like poker players, basically. Business negotiation, military strategy, cybersecurity, and medical treatment are all areas the bot’s designers say could benefit from the algorithms that govern its automated decision-making.

Get ready, humanity — the bots have entered the building.

[hunter]

1. This was a game that was supposed to be robot-proof.

There may be a temporary comeback as humans learn to counter the weirdness of machine strategies, maybe even pick up some of those strategies in their own play against other humans, but that too will pass.

I'm one of those people who think Star Trek TNG's Data is fully "human." Our own minds are a vast collection of special software tools, including software tools for learning and selecting among the available software tools; our minds are entirely biological mechanisms acquired by the process of evolution.

"Artificial Intelligence" is possible because intelligence is already demonstrated in the entirely mechanistic processes of our own minds.

This perspective does not detract from my spiritual views in any way. The complexity of the human mind, and the path by which it evolved are amazing.

The assertion that automation will replace most jobs seems very likely. We must create an economic system where this does not further aggravate the increasing disparities of wealth. This thing we now call "economic productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.