Machines have been taking over a lot of jobs from humans ever since the industrial revolution, one step at a time, but the one thing it hasn’t overcome is our brain and its critical thinking, for now let’s just say.
A competition has been held in Carnegie Mellon University’s Claudicio program was pitted against the four best poker players of the world and the humans defeated the program.
This was a 2 weeks long competition with 80 thousands hands held at Rivers Casino. The humans ended with a $732,713 collective lead over the program. Although with a total of $170 million on the table, the size of the victory was neither considered to be statistically significant nor scientifically reliable which means that the margin was not big enough to be taken as a statistical tie.
Tuomas Sandholm, the CMU professor of computer science who directed development of Claudico, said in a statement that, “We knew Claudico was the strongest computer poker program in the world, but we had no idea before this competition how it would fare against four Top 10 poker players. It would have been no shame for Claudico to lose to a set of such talented pros, so even pulling off a statistical tie with them is a tremendous achievement.”
After all the chips had been tallied, Bjorn Li had a total of $529,033, Doug Polk had $213,671, Dong Kimhad $70,049 and Jason Les trailed Claudico by $80,482. All of these four players rank in the top 10 in the world in two-player, no limit Texas Hold’em.
Li said, “We know theoretically that artificial intelligence is going to overtake us one day. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is that the humans remain on top for now.”
These players had 20,000 in hand when they started off with Claudico and no actual money had changed hands in the duration of the game although each player had been set for receiving appearance fee from a purse of $100,000.
Craig Clark, general manager of Rivers Casino said, “Thanks to the online stream, the pros had fans rooting for them from all over the world throughout the challenge, in addition to the local players visiting our gaming floor. It’s been very exciting to see this unfold over the last two weeks, and it was a pleasure to partner with Carnegie Mellon University and host these outstanding players.”
