For anyone stuck to a casino stool playing hours of video poker, rest assured: Humans can still beat a computer. But computers may soon dominate on the felt-top table, as they have on the chessboard.
In a match of wits between man and machine this week, a software program running on an ordinary laptop computer fought a close match but lost to two professional poker players.
The match, which was billed as the "First Man-Machine Poker Championship" and offered prize money totaling $50,000, pitted Phil Laak and Ali Eslami against Polaris, a program written by a team of artificial-intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta.
University of Alberta researchers created a program that first won the world checkers championship in 1994, and this month they said they had developed a program that could not lose, and at best could be tied, at checkers.
In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer-based system for playing chess, developed by IBM researchers, beat Garry Kasparov, the then world chess champion.
But poker is thought to be a more difficult challenge for software designers than games like chess and checkers, because in poker, information is hidden from the players.
The game requires different strategies and algorithms to deal with the uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player, as well as with difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors like bluffing.
But computers are getting better at poker, and Jonathan Schaeffer, chairman of the University of Alberta computer science department and the researcher who started the poker playing research effort 16 years ago, says that the advances in poker-playing software are likely to be more applicable in the real world.
"I contend that poker is harder than chess for computers, and the research results that come out of the work on poker will be much more generally applicable than what came out of the chess research," he said.
Research interest has shifted to games like poker in recent years, in part because chess is no longer of keen interest and in part because rapid progress is being made in developing new algorithms with broad real-world applications in areas like negotiation and commerce, said Tuomas Sandholm, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist.
The version of poker used in the match Monday and Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement Artificial Intelligence was a popular game called Texas Hold'em, heads-up limit poker, a two-player game in which some cards are hidden and others are playable by both sides.
Unlike chess competitions, which are usually marked by extreme concentration and long moments of silence while competitors study the layout of pieces on the board, the tournament in Vancouver took on a more festive air, with each human competitor offering a running commentary.
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