Darren Elias knows poker. The 32-year-old is the only person to have won four World Poker Tour titles and has earned more than $7 million at tournaments. Despite his expertise, he learned something new this spring from an artificial intelligence bot.
Tom Simonite covers artificial intelligence for WIRED.Elias was helping test new software from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook. He and another pro, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, each played 5,000 hands over the internet in six-way games against five copies of a bot called Pluribus.
At the end, the bot was ahead by a good margin. Along the way, Elias noticed something: Although machines are often thought of as uninspired, this bot was ballsier than your typical poker pro. “It will bet two or three times the pot, which humans don’t do very much,” Elias says. “These huge bets are interesting to me and something I will incorporate into my own play.”
Pluribus is significant not just because a new bot taught an old pro new tricks. The software is the first to beat top professionals at multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold’em, seen as the elite form of poker. A paper in the journal Science on Thursday describes how Pluribus took on Elias and Ferguson, and also won handily in scenarios where a single copy of the bot played five human professionals for 10,000 hands.
“If you sit this bot down with five elite professional humans, it is going to beat them and make money off them,” says Noam Brown, a researcher in Facebook’s AI lab and cocreator of Pluribus. “This is really the gold standard as far as poker goes.”
