Robot defeats world's top poker players in breakthrough for Artificial Intelligence

Playing five other players simultaneously presents unique demands
Playing five other players simultaneously presents unique demands Credit: Gaye Gerard

A robot has defeated some of the world’s best poker players during a six-player game, in a new victory for artificial intelligence.

The win is being hailed as a milestone in the development of machine learning because of the demands involved in taking on more than one opponent at the same time.

The bot, called Pluribus, defeated leading professionals in games of no-limit Texas hold'em poker, the most popular form of poker.

Pluribus beat professional Darren Elias, who holds the record for most World Poker Tour titles, and Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, winner of six World Series of Poker events.

Each professional separately played 5,000 hands of poker against five copies of Pluribus, which was developed by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with Facebook AI.

In another experiment involving 13 professionals, all of whom have won more than one million US dollars playing poker, Pluribus played five professionals at a time for a total of 10,000 hands and again emerged victorious.

Professor Tuomas Sandholm developed Pluribus alongside Noam Brown at Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department.

Professor Sandholm said: "Pluribus achieved superhuman performance at multi-player poker, which is a recognised milestone in artificial intelligence and in game theory that has been open for decades.

"Thus far, superhuman AI milestones in strategic reasoning have been limited to two-party competition.

"The ability to beat five other players in such a complicated game opens up new opportunities to use AI to solve a wide variety of real-world problems."

In 2015 a machine called AlphaGo, built by the British company Deep Mind, which is owned by Google, defeated a human Go player for the first time.

The robot taught itself sufficient knowledge to overcome thousands of years of accumulated wisdom on how to win the Chinese game in just 40 days. 

The new study is published in the journal Science.