Humanity was dealt a decisive blow by a poker-playing artificial intelligence program called Polaris during the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas. Poker champs fought the AI system to a draw, then won in the first two of four rounds (each round had Polaris playing 500 hands against two humans, whose points were averaged.) But in the final two rounds of the match, Polaris beat both human teams, two wins out of four, with one loss and one draw. IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. A year later, the University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group began winning hands with early prototypes that eventually became Polaris. A decade later, Polaris 2.0 added poker to the list of machine triumphs.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208802992
