Pluribus - so-named because it takes on many opponents at once - learns by playing against itself over and over and remembering which strategies worked best. He'd take on four tables full of them at a time, and he'd alert the computer scientists who designed the bot when it made a mistake. 'It's just me and then five versions of this AI poker bot, which I would play against every day, thousands of hands,' Elias said. Each hand has a rank, which is compared against the ranks of other hands participating in the showdown to decide who wins the pot. In poker, players form sets of five playing cards, called hands, according to the rules of the game.
Researchers say they have designed a bot called Pluribus capable of taking on poker professionals in the most popular form of poker and winning.įour-time World Poker Tour title holder Darren Elias helped test the program's skills, playing Texas Hold 'em against a whole table of the bots. An ace-high straight flush, commonly known as a royal flush, is the best possible hand in many variants of poker. But a game like poker, specifically six-player Texas Hold 'em, has been too tough for a machine to master - until now.
In artificial intelligence, it's a milestone when a computer program can beat top players at a game like chess. During one experiment, the poker bot Pluribus played against five professional players.
