Poker AI is Back: Chinese Players to Play AI for $290,000
Carnegie Mellon University has produced another artificial intelligence bot to compete against six top Chinese poker players in no-limit Texas hold’em for a $290,000 winner-take-all purse.
This AI, named Lengpudashi or “cold poker master,” will play 36,000 hands with the pros April 6-10. Lengpudashi is another version of Libratus, an artificial intelligence bot that collected $1,766,250 in chips, a statistically significant finding, and bested four other poker pros in January.
Alan (Yue) Du leads Team Dragons, the team taking on Lengpudashi. Du won the 2016 WSOP Event #59, the $5,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em event.
The creators of Libratus are excited about bringing this new AI technology to China.
“I want to explore various commercial opportunities for this in poker and a host of other application areas ranging from recreational games to business strategy to strategic pricing to cybersecurity and medicine,” said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science and co-creator of Libratus and Lengpudashi with Ph.D. student Noam Brown, in a release.
Sandholm has exclusively licensed Libratus and other technologies from Carnegie Mellon through his recently founded company, Strategic Machine, Inc.
Unlike the competition in January, which was more of a science experiment, these hands are part of an exhibition, with a smaller number of total hands.
Team Dragon will play against Lengpudashi in Hainan for 10 hours a day, playing two hands at a time on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges Computer.
Sinovation Ventures, the organizers of the event, and Hainan Resort Software Community are hosting the event in a software park/resort in Haikou City.
Images courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University
