Popular Science: The computer that taught itself to bluff

Practice makes perfect, even if you  happen to be a piece of artificial intelligence.

That was the premise of an experiment led by Michael Bowling of the University of Alberta, which set up a program called Cepheus to play a billion billion (yes, a billion billion) hands of a poker variant called heads-up limit Texas Hold’Em against itself. Cepheus ran on 4,600 CPUs, considering 6 billion hands per second, learning from each victory, split pot, and defeat. After the equivalent of 1,000 years of CPU time during 70 actual days, Cepheus had played more poker than that played by the entire human race. In a paper published in Science, the Bowling team announced that with Cepheus, they had effectively “solved” heads-up limit Texas Hold’Em -- meaning that the program’s decisions were so close to perfect that there was no way to see if a theoretically perfect human playing 200 hands an hour 12 hours a day over 70 years could do better.