Artificial intelligence bluffs at poker
The fact that computer programmes can play poker is nothing new. Now a US university has developed an artificial intelligence that can deceive its human opponent with a bluff.
For a long time, bluffing was thought to be a purely human endeavour. A computer won't be able to lie, cheat or deceive us. But in the 1950s, we also thought that there would never be a computer that could play chess. We were wrong on both counts.
A few days ago, Noam Brown and Tuomas Sandholm from Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with Facebook's AI department, published a scientific article about an artificial intelligence called Pluribus. Pluribus is a poker AI that has never existed before. Compared to previous poker bots, it not only calculates the probability of a win, but is also able to bluff and bet on a bad hand. However, Pluribus does not consider this strategy to be deceptive or a lie. The AI merely relies on this action to dust off the most possible chips in any situation.
Pluribus is a very strong opponent. It's really difficult to pin him down on any hand.
Before Pluribus was able to do this, the two researchers had to teach him how to play poker. They achieved this by having the AI compete against copies of itself. This self-play process is a common technique for teaching artificial intelligence to do things. Through "try and error", Pluribus played hundreds of thousands of hands against itself. This phase lasted just eight days and was run on a simple 64-core server with less than 512 GB of RAM.
Pluribus is unbeatable
Once Pluribus had grasped the concept of the game, Brown and Sandholm had to instil the added complexity of six opponents. They had to teach the AI how to look into the future and predict the opponents' moves. If the AI had to calculate this until the end of the game, it would be far too complex and take too much time. The developers have therefore designed the AI so that it only looks two or three moves ahead. This allows Pluribus to adapt to the opponents again and again and requires a fraction of the time needed for the calculations.
This has worked. Pluribus is currently capable of winning against any poker player in the world, as no human is able to compete against the AI's fast mathematical skills. Even dyed-in-the-wool poker pros were no match for the artificial intelligence Pluribus in a test lasting 12 days and 10,000 hands. However, the developers are giving the all-clear: there are no plans to use Pluribus commercially in virtual poker rooms. The AI in its current form is merely a proof of concept. Pluribus is intended to help other researchers tackle computer behaviour in complex situations. According to Brown and Sandholm, possible applications include self-driving cars in urban traffic, cybersecurity, fraud prevention and financial negotiations. <p
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