Top Poker Players Face Off Against CMU Super Computer

NORTH SHORE (KDKA) -- Two years ago, four of the world's top poker players matched wits with a poker-playing CMU computer at Rivers Casino on the North Shore.

The humans won that round.

Wednesday morning, another group of professionals went up against an updated version of that computer. The marathon match has been dubbed "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante."

Professional poker players are going against a new computer called "Libratus" for twenty consecutive days. That comes to about 120,000 hands of poker. Jason Les and three other humans play two screens at once.

"It's playing quite a bit different this time than last time," Les says. "It's doing a lot of different things."

If players have an advantage, he says, it's human intuition.

"I don't have to play billions of hands to learn how to play well. I can kind of learn poker theory and how to apply it, whereas the algorithms require a lot of hands played to observe what works and what doesn't."

The players are not only competing with a computer, but with each other as well. When this game is finally over in twenty days, they will divvy up a $200,000 pot.

Computer science professor Tuomas Sandholm says he and CMU students have built an entity that never stops "thinking."

"Every night it will be computing more. So the super computer is doing stuff when these guys are sleeping."

He says games like this can lead to practical applications, like cybersecurity. Spectator Josh James came up from Washington, DC, to witness history in the making.

"It's fascinating to see some of these systems and algorithms that are able to train themselves," he marvels.

Players say a computer victory is inevitable... eventually.

"We'll see," Les says. "It could be this time."

But he and his teammates hope it isn't.

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