Heads-Up, Limit Hold’em Is “Solved” By AI, But Poker Is Alive And Well

A team of researchers from the University of Alberta comp sci department have ‘essentially solved’ heads-up limit hold'em, a significant accomplishment for game theory and artificial intelligence, but nowhere near the end of poker despite what some headlines would have you believe.

“The breakthroughs behind our result are general algorithmic advances that make game-theoretic reasoning in large-scale models of any sort more tractable,” write Michael Bowling, Neil Burch, Michael Johanson, and Oskari Tammelin in their paper Heads-up hold'em limit poker is solved, published in the current issue of Science.

Limit Hold'em: Researchers solved a specific, constrained version of Texas hold'em

Despite the claims running around that the researchers new program can beat anyone at poker, or even at Texas Hold'em,...