Libratus: The Superhuman AI for No-Limit Poker

Libratus: The Superhuman AI for No-Limit Poker

Noam Brown, Tuomas Sandholm

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

No-limit Texas Hold'em is the most popular variant of poker in the world. Heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em is the main benchmark challenge for AI in imperfect-information games. We present Libratus, the first - and so far only - AI to defeat top human professionals in that game. Libratus's architecture features three main modules, each of which has new algorithms: pre-computing a solution to an abstraction of the game which provides a high-level blueprint for the strategy of the AI, a new nested subgame-solving algorithm which repeatedly calculates a more detailed strategy as play progresses, and a self-improving module which augments the pre-computed blueprint over time.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Game Theory
Uncertainty in AI: Sequential Decision Making
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games