Halfway through the epic, two-weeklong poker battle dubbed “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence,” the humans have fought to a hefty lead over the computer at Rivers Casino.
Thursday marked the halfway point in the 80,000 hands of poker being played by four of the world’s best Heads-Up, No-Limit, Texas Hold ’em poker players against Carnegie Mellon University’s computer poker program known as “Claudico.”
Late Thursday, with 42,100 hands played, the humans had a cumulative, overall lead of $626,892. (The dollar amounts represent pretend chips. The players are playing for a cumulative pot of $100,000.) Three of the four players also held individual leads against Claudico.
That is close to what is considered to be “statistically significant,” a lead of somewhere around $600,000.
“But part of me wants it to be close, to make it a better match,” said Bjorn Li, one of the four humans competing and who is up $403,462 over Claudico in his overall head-to-head results. “We’re doing well so far.”
Though much could change in a week, the consistent, cumulative lead since the first day by Mr. Li and his three teammates — Dong Kyu Kim, Jason Les, and Doug Polk — already has both sides talking about a possible rematch sometime in the future.
“I think we’d love to do this again if we don’t pull through this time,” said Noam Brown, a computer science graduate student at CMU who helped develop Claudico.
After already getting several hundred thousand hits on the Web page, the casino set up for the live videos of the tournament — riverscasino.com/pittsburgh/BrainsVsAI — Rivers Casino general manager Craig Clark said Rivers would be interested in hosting again, too.
“We’re very happy with how this has gone,” he said. “Our website is getting thousands of hits, and one-third of them have been from Europe.”
As tiring as playing up to 12 hours of poker a day for seven days in a row has been, the players say they, too, would be interested — as long as some changes are made.
“I’d like to do this again because the computer will eventually be able to beat the humans,” said Mr. Polk, considered by many to be the world’s number one online, Heads-Up, No-Limit, Texas Hold ’em player. “But a rematch would need to meet certain criteria. We’ve encountered problems along the way and we’d need to work out on paper what the terms would be.”
The tournament has clearly raised the profiles of all four players. While they are highly ranked as online one-on-one players, they are not as well known as players who play on ESPN and other television channels in nine-person poker tournaments.
Each of them has had thousands of hits to the podcasts of their play during the tournament’s first week, in which viewers can not only see how each hand is played, but can hear the players’ commentary, exasperation, confusion and other emotions daily.
The star so far has been Mr. Polk, who spent most of the first week as one of two players playing in the publicly available tournament space in Rivers Casino’s Levels Lounge bar, on the floor of the casino. (To try to reduce the “luck” factor of the cards everyone is dealt, the players are playing as matched pairs, with one in the public space, and a matched teammate in a secluded room on the second floor of the casino. The public player in each pair gets the same cards on each hand that the computer gets when playing the secluded player, and visa versa.)
Naturally more gregarious and effusive than his teammates, Mr. Polk has managed to play at a high level. But he also manages to keep up an energetic, ongoing dialogues with regular people who stop by to watch and ask questions, as well as the occasional interviews by Mr. Brown or the CMU computer science professor, Tuomas Sandholm, who has overseen Claudico’s development over more than a decade.
“I try to make a good show of it and talk to people when I’m down here” in the public area, said Mr. Li. “But Doug is better at that.”
Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579
First Published: May 1, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
