On Friday, a team of some of the world’s top heads-up no-limit players finished off a two-week long match against Carnegie Mellon University’s poker bot named “Claudico.” Bjorn Li, Doug Polk, Dong Kim and Jason Les each played 20,000 hands against the machine and were up a combined 732,700 chips, which was more than 7,300 big blinds. Despite the win, researchers at Carnegie Mellon don’t believe it proves Claudico is inferior to the humans, given the variance in poker, the relatively small sample size and the margin of victory. “We knew Claudico was the strongest computer poker program in the world, but we had no idea before this competition how it would fare against four top 10 poker players,” Tuomas Sandholm, the Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science who directed development of Claudico, said in a statement. “It would have been no shame for Claudico to lose to a set of such talented pros, so even pulling off a statistical tie with them is a tremendous achievement.”
