Pluribus
Superhuman six-player poker for $150 of compute
Latest: Science publication, July 2019 ('Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker')
The first AI to beat elite professionals at six-player no-limit Texas Hold'em — the first superhuman result in any major game with more than two players. Built by Noam Brown (Facebook AI Research) and Tuomas Sandholm (CMU), it won across 10,000 hands against pros including Darren Elias and Chris Ferguson. Published in Science, July 2019; code was not released.
Why it matters
The first superhuman result in any major game with more than two players: six-player no-limit Texas Hold'em against professionals including Darren Elias and Chris Ferguson over 10,000 hands. Its blueprint strategy took eight days and 12,400 core-hours to compute, and it played live on 28 cores. Code was never released.
Facts
- Famously frugal: Pluribus trained its blueprint strategy in about 8 days on a 64-core server — roughly $150 of cloud compute — while beating 13 pros who had each won over $1M playing poker.
- The code stayed closed partly over concerns about online poker integrity.
Try it yourself
CMU announcement with details ↗
Lineage
Sources
Science ↗Meta AI blog ↗cs.cmu.edu ↗