Are humans are better at poker than computers? This question was settled on Tuesday night, as two professional poker players battled a computer program in a game of poker and won 2 out of 3 matches and one draw.
Phil Laak and Ali Esmali, the two poker professionals, took part in what was named as the "First Man-Machine Poker Championship". The contest between the humans and computer offered a prize money totaling $50,000.
The computer program, Polaris, was designed over 26 years by a team of artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada. The match was held at the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in Vancouver, which was one of the first scientific poker contests involving real players.
Both Laak and Esmail ended up with about $20,000 each, including a $5,000 honorarium for playing in the scientific game, after the computer beat them in the first match of 500 hands; tied the second game and lost the next two games.
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