For the last week, a poker-playing computer algorithm has been putting money on the line against four human players. The software, called Claudico, was developed by a team led by Carnegie Melon computer scientist Tuomas Sandholm. After a week of games at a Pittsburgh casino, the program is currently down, but it's far from out.
An earlier version of Claudico managed to come in first at an all-algorithm poker tournament, so its creators were interested in seeing how it would do against top human players. To attract those, Microsoft Research put up a $100,000 purse. To provide some scientific value, the tournament has unusual rules: each hand the computer receives will also be given to a human player, so their actions and results can be compared. The tournament will also go on for another week to ensure that enough hands are dealt to get some statistically significant results.
Computers have solved Limit Texas Hold'em (in that they've generated an optimal strategy for every hand), but the tournament will use the no-limit form, which is significantly more complicated. To try to optimize Claudico's performance, the team used a supercomputing cluster with 16TB of RAM, which is needed to help hold as many of the possible outcomes of a given hand as possible.
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