Computer scientists have developed a card-playing bot, called Pluribus, capable of defeating some of the world’s best players at six-person no-limit Texas hold’em poker, in what’s considered an important breakthrough in artificial intelligence.

Two years ago, a research team from Carnegie Mellon University developed a similar poker-playing system, called Libratus, which consistently defeated the world’s best players at one-on-one Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker. The creators of Libratus, Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown, have now upped the stakes, unveiling a new system capable of playing six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker, a wildly popular version of the game. Buy Cheap Texas Hold'em Poker Chips on 777chips.com with Cheap Price and Safe Payment.

Ultimately, the machine came out ahead of Elias. So scientists tried a different experiment in which they put one bot up against a full table of pro players. And it won again. Their research was published today in the journal Science.The easiest way to quantify how well Pluribus did was by how much money it was winning. "If this were for live money, the bot would be winning at a rate of about $1,000 an hour," says Facebook AI research scientist Noam Brown, who designed Pluribus with Tuomas Sandholm, his adviser at Carnegie Mellon University.

"Pluribus' major strength is its ability to use mixed strategies," said Elias. "That's the same thing that humans try to do. It's a matter of execution for humans – to do this in a perfectly random way and to do so consistently. Most people just can't." One unusual strategy adopted by the machine was "donk betting", which involves ending one round with a call and starting the next with a bet. Traditionally, it's seen as a weak, non-sensical move that human players tend to avoid. Yet, Pluribus used donk bets much more frequently than its (defeated) human opponents.