Artificial Intelligence ‘Lengpudashi’ Scores Landslide Victory Against Team Dragon

The robots are winning and the latest to defeat humans is Lengpudashi ‘cold poker master’ the newly developed version of the earlier Libratus. The exhibition match was held at Hainan, China where Lengpudashi was pitted against Team Dragon, which had six Chinese pros, led by Alan Du.

Those unaware, Du won the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em Event at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in 2016 for $800,586. That event had a field of 863 entries including some poker greats. Du is also a venture capitalist and would have gained about $40,000 if he had won against the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lengpudashi. The entire team stood to claim $2,90,000 if they had won.

Not that Du and his team lacked in any skills. Du ensured that he had the best choice of poker players, who were also highly educated computer scientists and investors. According to Du “We held ourselves very well when playing against this world-class opponent.”

The contest lasted 36,000 hands across five days and the result was deduced from a point-based score. Lengpudashi scored a landslide victory and started leading after Day 2, with an advantage of $347,000 in play money chips.

This was the fourth such contest between AI and human pros, starting with Claudico, Libratus, and DeepStack. AI versus poker pro matches is just a way to improve the software in order to make it viable for other applications in daily life, such as medical emergencies and security.

According to Noam Brown, the Lengpudashi AI was “surprisingly affordable” could be soon developed for smartphones, as early as within 5 years.

Other companies are also developing similar AI and on Monday, Google announced that its DeepMind AI software would soon be pitted against top-ranked Chinese Go player Ke Jie.