It’s now become old hat – AI poker algorithm beats humans. Carnegie Mellon University is at the forefront of creating this new class of crafty AI gamblers. Yesterday, CMU reported its latest poker playing program – Lengpudashi or “cold poker master” – beat six Chinese players in a 36,000-hand exhibition that ended Monday in Hainan. Lengpudashi won a total of $792,327 in virtual chips.

Not all the winnings are virtual. Strategic Machine Inc., a company founded by Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science and co-creator of Libratus/Lengpudashi with Noam Brown, Ph.D. student in computer science, will take home a pot worth approximately $290,000 from the latest contest. Not bad.

Lengpudashi is a version of Libratus, the CMU AI that beat four top poker professionals during a 20-day, 120,000-hand Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em competition in January in Pittsburgh. Indeed, CMU has created a poker playing clan – Lengpudashi, Libratus, Claudico, and Tartanian8 – whose growing success is yet more evidence of AI/deep learning’s rapid rise.

Heading into the competition, Sandholm said, “I am very excited to take this new kind of AI technology to China. I want to explore various commercial opportunities for this in poker and a host of other application areas ranging from recreational games to business strategy to strategic pricing to cybersecurity and medicine.”

He emphasized, “This is an exhibition, not a match, challenge or competition. We are running a relatively small number of hands, so this is not a scientific experiment like the Brains Vs. AI competition in January.”

CMU reports that although Libratus and Lengpudashi played different numbers of hands in their separate competitions, Lengpudashi’s final margin of victory was bigger — by 220 milli-big-blinds per game vs. 147 milli-big-blinds per game for Libratus. A milli-big blind is one-thousandth of the bet required to win a game, and milli-big-blinds per game is a standard metric for comparing poker efficiency. (For more on “milli-big-blinds” and other AI poker computational challenges see HPCwire article, More Bad News for Gamblers – AI Wins…Again)

The exhibition was organized by Kai-Fu Lee, a CMU alumnus and former faculty member who is CEO of Sinovation Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups in China and the United States. He is a former executive of Apple, Microsoft and Google, and is one of the most prominent figures in China’s internet sector. Sinovation and Hainan Resort Software Community hosted the exhibition.

Strategic Machine has exclusively licensed Libratus and other technologies from Sandholm’s CMU laboratory. Strategic Machine targets a broad set of applications: poker and other recreational games, business strategy, negotiation, cybersecurity, physical security, military applications, strategic pricing, finance, auctions, political campaigns, and medical treatment planning.

Link CMU release: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/carnegie-mellon-ai-beats-chinese-poker-players