IA beats humans in poker game

A poker-playing AI has beaten four human players in a marathon match lasting 20 days.

Libratus, an artificial intelligence program developed at Carnegie Mellon University, was trained to play a variant of the game known as no-limit heads-up Texas hold 'em, BBC News reports.

In a similar tournament in 2015, the humans won.

The victory has been hailed as a significant milestone for AI, by the team responsible for building it.

The AI won more than $1.5m (£1.2m) worth of chips from the humans.

The matches - held at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh - were live-streamed over gaming site Twitch.

Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, said the event was "historic".

"Heads-up no limit Texas hold 'em is in a way the last frontier of all the games," he said.

"Othello, Chess, Go, Jeopardy have all been conquered, but this remained elusive: this is a landmark in AI game-play."

Prof Sandholm said that the algorithm could be transferred to a range of other uses.

"This is not just about poker," he said.

"The algorithms can take information and output a strategy in a range of scenarios, including negotiations, finance, medical treatment and cybersecurity."

"Now we have proven the ability of AI to do strategy and reasoning, there are many potential applications in future."