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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Triumph in complex variant of game brings bots closer to solving thorny real-world problems.
Machines have raised the stakes once again. A superhuman poker-playing bot called Pluribus has beaten top human professionals at six-player no-limit Texas hold 'em poker, the most popular variant of the game. It is the first time that an artificial-intelligence (AI) program has beaten elite human players at a game with more than two participants (N. Brown and T Sandholm Science http://doi.org/c766; 2019).
"While going from two to six players might seem incremental, it's actually a big deal," says Julian Togelius at New York University in New York City, who studies games and AI. "The multiplayer aspect is something that is not present at all in other games that are currently studied."
The team behind Pluribus had already built an AI, called Libratus, that had beaten professionals at two-player poker. It built Pluribus by updating Libratus and created a bot that needs much less computing power to play matches. In a 12-day session with more than 10,000 hands, it beat 15 leading human players. "A lot of AI researchers didn't think it was possible to do this" with our...