Facebook's AI crushes professionals in six-player poker

An artificial intelligence bot, created by researchers at Facebook and Carnegie Mellon, can beat human poker professionals in a six-player, no-limit Hold'em game, Facebook announced Thursday. 

Pluribus, as the AI bot is called, has "decisively" won against a number of pros, including two World Series of Poker Main Event winners. 

The details on how the researchers have managed to make Pluribus so good at multiplayer poker — a notoriously hard problem in AI — are in a new paper published in Science. 

Pluribus has been built on the shoulders of Libratus, an AI that bested human pro players in two-player poker in 2017. It learned to play by competing against itself, without any data of prior human or AI play. Since poker is incredibly complex, having Pluribus look too far into the future wasn't viable; instead, the bot used a new search algorithm that helps it make good decisions by looking at just the few next moves (instead of trying to figure out all the moves until the end of the game). It also used new and faster self-play algorithms that helped it cope with all the hidden information present in poker.  Read more...