AI for Imperfect-Information Games: Beating Top Humans in No-Limit Poker

Despite AI successes in perfect-information games, the hidden information and large size of no-limit poker have made the game difficult for AI to tackle. Libratus is an AI that, in a 120,000-hand competition, defeated four top pros in heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em poker, the leading benchmark in imperfect-information game solving. This talk explains why imperfect-information games are fundamentally more difficult than perfect-information games, and the advances in Libratus that overcame those challenges. In particular, this talk describes new methods for real-time planning in imperfect-information games that have theoretical guarantees. Additional research has extended these methods to deeper game trees, enabling the development of the master-level poker AI Modicum which was constructed using only a 4-core CPU and 16 GB of RAM. These algorithms are domain-independent and can be applied to a variety of strategic interactions involving hidden information.

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