Computer AI is advancing at an incredible rate, and AI scored another victory against humanity recently, when a computer program called Polaris managed to beat professional poker players at the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas.
Humanity got a strong start in the tournament, with poker champs managing to score a draw in round one, and a victory in round two, but the Polaris program won the other two rounds.
For each round, Polaris played 500 hands against two humans, and the points were averaged to give an overall score.
Polaris scored the victory by using a tactical shift in play style halfway through the tournament. Polaris also learned from experience, and watched how the other players tended to play.
Professor Michael Bowling, who had supervised the graduate students that programmed Polaris, said “There are two really big changes in Polaris over last year [...] First of all, our poker model is much expanded over last year – it's much harder for humans to exploit weaknesses. And secondly, we have added an element of learning, where Polaris identifies which common poker strategy a human is using and switches its own strategy to counter. This complicated the human players ability to compare notes, since Polaris chose a different strategy to use against each of the humans it played.”
Polaris played against a number of players including Nick “Soxtrader” Grudzien, a professional player with a $1 million poker contest prize under his belt.
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