Carnegie Mellon duo Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown are back with a new artificial intelligence hellbent on the destruction of poker. Lengpudashi is currently in China beating a team of humans in a $290k winner takes all exhibition match.
Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown, the creators of artificial intelligence (AI) machines born at Carnegie Mellon University are back to their poker destroying best, this time, making an appearance in Hainan, China.
The parents of Libratus have created an offspring called Lengpudashi (cold poker master), and their icky baby is currently smashing its rattle over the heads of a team of six human players competing under the alias: Team Dragon.
But don’t worry, it’s Only An Exhibition match, making you wonder if Rocky IV ever aired in the land of the rising sun.
Venture Capitalist Alan “Yue” Du is the head of Team Dragon. Du made history in 2016 when he defeated a field of 863 players, including a final table that housed the likes of Natasha Mercier, Dominik Nitsche, and Ismael Bojang in the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em World Series of Poker (WSOP) event thus becoming the first man from China to win a bracelet.
Du picked up $800,586 for his bracelet victory and stands to receive $290,000 (albeit a sixth of it) if he can help inspire Team Dragon to do what Jason Les, Daniel McAuley, Dong Kim, and Jimmy Chou couldn’t do against AI Libratus at the turn of the year.
In that groundbreaking match, Libratus, who plays billions of hands against itself when it’s not creating plans to take over the universe, defeated the quartet to the tune of $1.7m play money chips. It was the first time AI had beaten humans in the form of No-Limit Hold’em. An earlier version, Claudico, failed to beat a team spearheaded by Doug Polk in May 2015.
The latest exhibition match began on April 6 and will end on the 10th after each player has played for ten hours per day and 36,000 hands in total. After Day 2, Lengpudashi was winning by $347,000 play money chips.
Sinovation Ventures, Kai-Fu Lee, organised the event and Sandholm, who founded Strategic Machine, Inc., in the wake of the Libratus win, told the press that he was excited about his little baby’s visit to China where they can explore various commercial opportunities.
I hope for every dollar someone is throwing Sandholm’s way, a dollar more is heading to the meta-charities trying desperately to draw attention to the fact that creating human level intelligence isn’t as sexy as it sounds.
When it comes to AI the biggest problem facing humanity is control. Lengpudashi isn’t physically in Hainan. It’s currently locked away inside Carnegie Mellon University.
But for how long?
The Control Problem is an issue that AI researchers have to crack before people like Sandholm and Brown create a machine that decides the best way to beat humans at poker is by killing all humans.
Do you remember Rocky IV?
Apollo Creed was a beautiful specimen of a human being, but Ivan Drago was a machine.
Let’s not put a supercomputer into the mind of Ivan Drago until we can control it.
“If he dies, he dies.”
And that was an exhibition match, also.
Click here to watch the live stream
