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Bots are superhuman in no-limit Texas hold'em. Libratus beat top humans in two-player in 2017 and Pluribus beat top humans in six-player in 2019: https://www.sc

Bots are superhuman in no-limit Texas hold'em. Libratus beat top humans in two-player in 2017 and Pluribus beat top humans in six-player in 2019: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aao1733 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aao1733 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aay2400 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aay2400 It's shocking that the reporter didn't mention these results or anything else more recent than 2015.

bko 5y ago
The article was fascinating but honestly read like an ad for PioSolver
- bluecalm 5y ago
  The journalist who contacted me told me he did so because the software keeps coming up when he talked to pro players. While it's certainly not one to advance the science the most (talk to Noam Brown if you want that), not the fastest (talk to Oskari Tammelin about that), it's still very popular and the first to get big following. It changed the game and got into the online poker culture. I am quite proud of that and I think it's deserved to be mentioned a lot in an article about how computers changed poker.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
lawrenceyan 5y ago
Noam is being too humble, but he’s one of the primary creators of Libratus/Pluribus as an fyi.
hooande 5y ago
Have to say, Pluribus beating top humans for 10,000 hands isn't the same thing as being super human. It's just too small of a sample to make that claim. Further, thousands of the hands that Pluribus played against the human pros are available online in an easy to parse format [0]. I've analyzed them. Pluribus has multiple obvious deficiencies in its play that I can describe in detail. It seems like it's very difficult to set up any kind of proper repeatable and controlled experiment involving something as random as poker. Personally, I would be much more convinced if Pluribus played against real humans online and was highly profitable over a period of several months. This violates the terms of service / rules of many online poker sites, but it seems like the most definitive way to claim terms like "solved" or "superhuman" [0] http://kevinwang.us/lets-analyze-pluribuss-hands/ http://kevinwang.us/lets-analyze-pluribuss-hands/
- noambrown 5y ago
  Normally 10,000 hands would be too small a sample size but we used variance-reduction techniques to reduce the luck factor. Think things like all-in EV but much more powerful. It's described in the paper.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    Do you think human players could use the results of this paper to learn how to be better poker players? I'm wondering if it could be an alpha go type situation where players learned different strategies.
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    Where is the variance-reduction technique discussed? I looked at this paper https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aay2400 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aay2400 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10077416 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10077416 and it just says > Finally, we tested Libratus against top humans. In January 2017, Libratus played against a team of four top HUNL specialist professionals in a 120,000 hand Brains vs. AI challenge match over 20 days. The participants were Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McCauley, and Jimmy Chou. A prize pool of $200,000 was allocated to the four humans in aggregate. Each human was guaranteed $20,000 of that pool. The remaining $120,000 was divided among them based on how much better the human did against Libratus than the worstperforming of the four humans. Libratus decisively defeated the humans by a margin of 147 mbb/hand, with 99.98% statistical significance and a p-value of 0.0002 (if the hands are treated as independent and identically distributed), see Fig. 3 (57). It also beat each of the humans individually.
    - alasdair_ 5y ago
      >The remaining $120,000 was divided among them based on how much better the human did against Libratus than the worstperforming of the four humans. Surely the correct strategy here is for the human players to collude to give as much money as possible to a single player and then split the money afterwords, no? Also, the fact that they players can only gain money without losing anything likely changes their play somewhat. By default I'd assume (and have generally observed) that most players on a freeroll (or better than a freeroll really) tend to undervalue their position and gamble more than is usually wise. I'd definitely be interested in seeing a "real" game where the humans are betting their own money.
howdydoo 5y ago
I know that PioSolver is not a "poker AI" per se, but the article seems to say it can tell you what to do based on the table situation. Has anyone tried pitting pro players against PioSolver?
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  PioSolver requires putting in the hand range of the opponent, so the quality of PioSolver's solution is largely down to how accurate the guess at that hand range is. But if a pro knows he is playing against PioSolver configured with a certain hand range he can just change his strategy to adapt. In theory though if PioSolver knows the correct hand range then it shouldn't be possible to any better than tie given enough hands.

bko 5y ago

The article was fascinating but honestly read like an ad for PioSolver

bluecalm 5y ago
The journalist who contacted me told me he did so because the software keeps coming up when he talked to pro players. While it's certainly not one to advance the science the most (talk to Noam Brown if you want that), not the fastest (talk to Oskari Tammelin about that), it's still very popular and the first to get big following. It changed the game and got into the online poker culture. I am quite proud of that and I think it's deserved to be mentioned a lot in an article about how computers changed poker.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

lawrenceyan 5y ago

Noam is being too humble, but he’s one of the primary creators of Libratus/Pluribus as an fyi.

hooande 5y ago

Have to say, Pluribus beating top humans for 10,000 hands isn't the same thing as being super human. It's just too small of a sample to make that claim. Further, thousands of the hands that Pluribus played against the human pros are available online in an easy to parse format [0]. I've analyzed them. Pluribus has multiple obvious deficiencies in its play that I can describe in detail. It seems like it's very difficult to set up any kind of proper repeatable and controlled experiment involving something as random as poker. Personally, I would be much more convinced if Pluribus played against real humans online and was highly profitable over a period of several months. This violates the terms of service / rules of many online poker sites, but it seems like the most definitive way to claim terms like "solved" or "superhuman" [0] http://kevinwang.us/lets-analyze-pluribuss-hands/ http://kevinwang.us/lets-analyze-pluribuss-hands/

noambrown 5y ago
Normally 10,000 hands would be too small a sample size but we used variance-reduction techniques to reduce the luck factor. Think things like all-in EV but much more powerful. It's described in the paper.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  Do you think human players could use the results of this paper to learn how to be better poker players? I'm wondering if it could be an alpha go type situation where players learned different strategies.
- jessriedel 5y ago
  Where is the variance-reduction technique discussed? I looked at this paper https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aay2400 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aay2400 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10077416 https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10077416 and it just says > Finally, we tested Libratus against top humans. In January 2017, Libratus played against a team of four top HUNL specialist professionals in a 120,000 hand Brains vs. AI challenge match over 20 days. The participants were Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McCauley, and Jimmy Chou. A prize pool of $200,000 was allocated to the four humans in aggregate. Each human was guaranteed $20,000 of that pool. The remaining $120,000 was divided among them based on how much better the human did against Libratus than the worstperforming of the four humans. Libratus decisively defeated the humans by a margin of 147 mbb/hand, with 99.98% statistical significance and a p-value of 0.0002 (if the hands are treated as independent and identically distributed), see Fig. 3 (57). It also beat each of the humans individually.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    >The remaining $120,000 was divided among them based on how much better the human did against Libratus than the worstperforming of the four humans. Surely the correct strategy here is for the human players to collude to give as much money as possible to a single player and then split the money afterwords, no? Also, the fact that they players can only gain money without losing anything likely changes their play somewhat. By default I'd assume (and have generally observed) that most players on a freeroll (or better than a freeroll really) tend to undervalue their position and gamble more than is usually wise. I'd definitely be interested in seeing a "real" game where the humans are betting their own money.

howdydoo 5y ago

I know that PioSolver is not a "poker AI" per se, but the article seems to say it can tell you what to do based on the table situation. Has anyone tried pitting pro players against PioSolver?

jeffreyrogers 5y ago
PioSolver requires putting in the hand range of the opponent, so the quality of PioSolver's solution is largely down to how accurate the guess at that hand range is. But if a pro knows he is playing against PioSolver configured with a certain hand range he can just change his strategy to adapt. In theory though if PioSolver knows the correct hand range then it shouldn't be possible to any better than tie given enough hands.