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Speaking to CardPlayer.com Monday, the co-creator of the Artificial Intelligence “Libratus” that left a handful of poker pros in the dust last month suggests the bot could soon take on Six-Max poker.
Carnegie Mellon student Noam Brown developed Libratus along with his professor Tuomas Sandholm. Never before had a machine beat its world-class human opponents in the game of heads-up no-limit hold’em.
In the must read interview with Brown, the discussion turned to how much Libratus could ultimately handle in playing poker.
CARD PLAYER: If the stack sizes in the match were lowered or raised, what effect would that have had on the results of the match? Could the machine handle a stack of 500-1,000 big blinds?
NB: 200 big blinds was chosen because that’s the format used in the annual computer poker competition. There’s an annual competition where AI researchers who do work on poker meet and play against each other. 200 big blinds was seen a posing a particularly difficult challenge to AI because as the stacks grow deeper the AIs have more trouble dealing with the increasing number of options available. From my understanding, 200 big blinds is on the upper end of what humans play with. I think that it was an appropriate size to use to keep things fair but also to make it as challenging as possible for the AI. If the stacks were lower, for example 100 big blinds, the AI would have done just as well if not better. The question how would it have done if the stacks were 500 or 1,000 big blinds deep…honestly I think it would have done just as well if not better also. Not because it’s easier for the AI but because it’s harder for the humans at that point. I don’t think the humans are used to playing at 500 or 1,000 big blinds deep. At that those stacks, these huge over-bets that Libratus really excels at would be much more important. I don’t know if the humans could pull off [over-betting] as well as Libratus would.
In regard to Libratus eventually being able to play a perfect GTO strategy, Brown acknowledged he was uncertain at this time, however, he and his professor intend to study this in the coming year.
“If I had to speculate, my guess is that a perfect GTO bot might beat Libratus by 15 big blinds per 100,” Brown said. “That’s my rough estimate. It could be anywhere between 5 and 50 big blinds per 100.”
- Ace King, Gambling911.com
