Poker News

Man beats poker machine

2007-07-27 14:27:28

The annual meeting of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence featured an unusual match this week, as human players narrowly edged their computer counterparts.

The match was organized in Los Angeles and billed as the First Man-Machine Poker Championship.

It was set up to test a program developed by artificial intelligence experts at the University of Alberta in Canada, by making it compete against two professional human players.

Phiil Laak and Ali Eslami, among the best in the world, played four Texas Hold 'Em games against computer Polaris over a period of two days at a convention centre in Los Angeles.

Polaris did manage to win one of the games, with its human rivals taking two others to win overall.

Although the humans won, Mr Eslami expressed himself surprised that they had managed to do so and predicted that the computer would not be far off in being able to compete and win against human rivals.

Scientists have already had much success in teaching computers to play chess or draughts, but poker is a different challenge in that the rules and state of the game is not as consistent.

It is therefore though that a poker-playing computer could have many applications in other fields.