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DATE: May 26 2012
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Poker.co.uk - Poker News Archive

Monday 11th June 2007

Poker stars pitted against machine

Two of the world's top poker pros are set to battle it out for a $50,000 prize - against a computer.

Scientists at the University of Alberta have challenged Phil (The Unabomber) Laak and Ali Eslami to 2,000 hands of Texas hold 'em against their Polaris computer program and they are confident that the machine will be able to out-think the human contestants.

Although computers have been famously used in chess games to demonstrate their evolving intelligence, the researchers at the university have chosen to put their machine into the poker world.

"We have developed a format that has helped us factor out luck and make it into a scientific experiment to determine how good humans are relative to the best program in the world," Jonathan Schaeffer, leader of the computer science team behind Polaris, announced confidently.

"The goal is to eventually produce a poker program that is stronger than all human players," he added, the Canadian Press reports.

This will not be the first time that Laak has battled it out against a computer, however. In 2005 he faced a contest with a computer in which he exclaimed at one point: "If that is a bluff, it's over for humanity." He later discovered it was a bluff, but the experience seems not to have deterred him from taking on the machines again!

Source: Direct News

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