Poker Pros Beat Computers

Last week a two-day poker contest was held at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia. Poker Pros Phil Laak and Ali Eslami took on a computer to see if it could beat a human at Texas Hold'em. Instead of just man against machine the match was set up so the two pros would be in separate rooms and they would receive mirror hands of each other. Laak would recive the hand dealt to the computer against Eslami and vice versa. A good hand for one wouold result in a bad hand for the other. This way the could see how the human and computer played each hand.

Computers have proven that they are superior chess, checker and backgammon players than their human opponents but so far the computers have not been able to surpass the humans in poker. This match was to test a new program based on atificial intelligence to see if it could over come the human elelment of the game. The contest, which was billed as the "First Man-Machine Poker Championship and there was a $50,000 prize for the winner.