AI Holds the Better Hand

Although games of skill like Go and chess have long been touchstones for intelligence, programmers have gotten steadily better at crafting programs that can now beat even the best human opponents. Only recently, however, has artificial intelligence (AI) begun to successfully challenge humans in the much more popular (and lucrative) game of poker.

Part of what makes poker difficult is that the luck of the draw in this card game introduces an intrinsic randomness (although randomness is also an element of games like backgammon, at which software has beaten humans for decades). More important, though, is that in the games where computers previously have triumphed, players have "perfect information" about the state of the play up until that point.