This talk gives a high-level explanation of Libratus, the first AI to defeat top humans in no-limit poker. A paper on the AI was published in Science in 2017. No-limit Texas hold’em is the most popular form of poker. Despite AI successes in perfect-information games, the private information and massive game tree have made no-limit poker difficult to tackle. We present Libratus, an AI that, in a 120,000-hand competition, defeated four top human specialist professionals in heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em, the leading benchmark and long-standing challenge problem in imperfect-information game solving. Our game-theoretic approach features application-independent techniques: an algorithm for computing a blueprint for the overall strategy, an algorithm that fleshes out the details of the strategy for subgames that are reached during play, and a self-improver algorithm that fixes potential weaknesses that opponents have identified in the blueprint strategy.
Noam Brown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dX0lwaQRX0