{"id":115153,"date":"2020-10-27T10:22:23","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T17:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/the-deck-is-not-rigged-poker-and-the-limits-of-ai"},"modified":"2020-10-27T10:22:23","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T17:22:23","slug":"the-deck-is-not-rigged-poker-and-the-limits-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/the-deck-is-not-rigged-poker-and-the-limits-of-ai","title":{"rendered":"The Deck Is Not Rigged: Poker and the Limits of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-deck-is-not-rigged-poker-and-the-limits-of-ai2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is not a poker player\u2014or much of a poker fan, in fact\u2014but he is fascinated by the game for much the same reason as the great game theorist John von Neumann before him. Von Neumann, who died in 1957, viewed poker as the perfect model for human decision making, for finding the balance between skill and chance that accompanies our every choice. He saw poker as the ultimate strategic challenge, combining as it does not just the mathematical elements of a game like chess but the uniquely human, psychological angles that are more difficult to model precisely\u2014a view shared years later by Sandholm in his research with <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/tag\/artificial-intelligence\/\">artificial intelligence<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPoker is the main benchmark and challenge program for games of imperfect information,\u201d Sandholm told me on a warm spring afternoon in 2018, when we met in his offices in Pittsburgh. The game, it turns out, has become the gold standard for developing artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>Tall and thin, with wire-frame glasses and neat brow hair framing a friendly face, Sandholm is behind the creation of three computer programs designed to test their mettle against human poker players: Claudico, Libratus, and most recently, <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2019\/07\/15\/the-poker-playing-ai-that-beat-the-worlds-best-players\/\">Pluribus<\/a>. (When we met, Libratus was still a toddler and Pluribus didn\u2019t yet exist.) The goal isn\u2019t to solve poker, as such, but to create algorithms whose decision making prowess in poker\u2019s world of imperfect information and stochastic situations\u2014situations that are randomly determined and unable to be predicted\u2014can then be applied to other stochastic realms, like the military, business, government, cybersecurity, even health care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is not a poker player\u2014or much of a poker fan, in fact\u2014but he is fascinated by the game for much the same reason as the great game theorist John von Neumann before him. Von Neumann, who died in 1957, viewed poker as the perfect model for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,34,1490,1495,41,2229,9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-government","category-health","category-information-science","category-mathematics","category-military","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}