Search Search AI’s defeat of pro poker players a ‘paradigm shift’, say scientists 'The implications go beyond being a milestone for artificial intelligence' Click to follow The Independent Online In a feat reminiscent of the controversial victory by supercomputer ‘Deep Blue’ over world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a computer program has managed to beat a string of professional poker players at the game.
 DeepStack, as it was called, defeated 10 out of 11 players who took part in a total of 3,000 games as part of a scientific study into artificial intelligence.
 The 11th player also lost, but by a margin that the researchers decided was not large enough to be statistically significant.
 Read more players This is not the first time a computer has won at poker.
 Libratus, a program developed by Carnegie Mellon University academics, won $1.
76m (£1.
4m) from professionals in January, for example.
 But the researchers said DeepStack's performance represented a "paradigm shift" in AI that could have implications for the defence industry and medicine.
 One player who took on the algorithm, Irish professional Dara O’Kearney, said it felt like he had been playing a human who was “a bit better than me, but not massively better”.
 He warned there was already “a lot of evidence” that bots were winning money from human players in online poker games.
 Poker: Will the government start taxing player's winnings?
 Writing in the journal Science, the researchers, from Alberta University in Canada, said: “Artificial intelligence has seen several breakthroughs in recent years, with games often serving as milestones.
 “A common feature of these games is that players have perfect information.
 Poker is the quintessential game of imperfect information, and a longstanding challenge problem in artificial intelligence.
 “In a study involving 44,000 hands of poker, DeepStack defeated with statistical significance professional poker players in heads-up, no-limit Texas hold’em.
” This type of poker involves just two players, the computer and the human in this case.
 The researchers said DeepStack had been able to win despite being given no training from expert human games.
 “The implications go beyond being a milestone for artificial intelligence,” the Science paper said.
 “DeepStack represents a paradigm shift in approximating solutions to large, sequential imperfect information games.
 “With many real world problems involving information asymmetry, DeepStack also has implications for seeing powerful AI applied more in settings that do not fit the perfect information assumption.
 “The abstraction paradigm for handling imperfect information has shown promise in applications like defending strategic resources and robust decision making as needed for medical treatment recommendations.
 “DeepStack’s continual re-solving paradigm will hopefully open up many more possibilities.
” Dara O'Kearney, an Irish poker professional who completed 456 hands, told The Independent that DeepStack played in a style similar to one used by some human players, based on game theory.
 “I would say there wasn’t a massive difference.
 If I hadn’t been told it was a computer, there was nothing it was doing that would have tipped me off that it was a computer,” he said.
 “I felt I did pretty much okay, but … I did feel the computer was a bit better than me, but not massively better.
 “Heads up, no limits poker is not my speciality.
 It’s possible a human who specialises in that might do better.
” Science news in pictures Science news in pictures The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years.
 The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth.
 Pictures by: Tom Momary Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels.
 Scott Birch.
 Wellcome Images Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid.
 The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squid’s mantle cavity can be clearly seen.
 Macroscopic Solutions.
 Wellcome Images archaeologists The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong.
 The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1.
9m YouTube Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field and are cooler areas on the star’s surface.
 Nasa Workflow Clear Cache NewsScience 132 million-year-old dinosaur fossil found at factory in Surrey Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger toxic chemicals on its surface The Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars Getty Images and third largest in the world, is seen in Yellowstone National Park.
 The park is famous for its geothermal activity – which includes its spectacular, flowing springs as well as the famous "Old Faithful" geyser that sprays water out every hour or so.
 REUTERS/Jim Urquhart This images is apart of the Wellcome Images Awards and shows how an artificial intraocular lens is fitted onto the eye.
 Used for conditions such as myopia and cataracts.
 Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT.
 Wellcome Images from the 'doomsday bank' Researchers in the Middle East have asked for seeds including those of wheat, barley and grasses, all of which are chosen because especially resistant to dry conditions.
 It is the first withdrawal from the bank, which was built in 2008.
 Those researchers would normally request the seeds from a bank in Aleppo.
 But that centre has been damaged by the war — while some of its functions continue, and its cold storage still works, it has been unable to provide the seeds that are needed by the rest of the Middle East, as it once did.
 New research has become the first to isolate the particular scent of human death, describing the various chemicals that are emitted by corpses in an attempt to help find them in the future.
 The researchers hope that the findings are the first step towards working on a synthetic smell that could train cadaver dogs to be able to more accurately find human bodies, or to eventually developing electronic devices that can look for the scent themselves.
 Astronomers have captured a black hole eating a star and then sicking a bit of it back up for the first time ever.
 The scientists tracked a star about as big as our sun as it was pulled from its normal path and into that of a supermassive black hole before being eaten up.
 They then saw a high-speed flare get thrust out, escaping from the rim of the black hole.
 Scientists have seen black holes killing and swallowing stars.
 And the jets have been seen before.
But a new study shows the first time that they have captured the hot flare that comes out just afterwards.
 And the flare and then swallowed star have not been linked together before evolutionary divide in North America A British scientist has uncovered the fossil of a dog-sized horned dinosaur that roamed eastern North America up to 100 million years ago.
 The fragment of jaw bone provides evidence of an east-west divide in the evolution of dinosaurs on the North American continent.
 During the Late Cretaceous period, 66 to 100 million years ago, the land mass was split into two continents by a shallow sea.
 This sea, the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.
 Dinosaurs living in the western continent, called Laramidia, were similar to those found in Asia Brains cannot be categorised into female and male, according to the first study to look at sex differences in the whole brain.
 Specific parts of the brain do show sex differences, but individual brains rarely have all “male” traits or all “female” traits.
 Some characteristics are more common in women, while some are more common in men, and some are common in both men and women, according to the study than previously thought Life may have come to earth 4.
1 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than we knew.
 The discovery, made using graphite that was trapped in ancient crystals, could mean that life began "almost instantaneously" after the Earth was formed.
 The researchers behind it have described the discovery as “a potentially transformational scientific advance”.
 Previously, life on Earth was understood to have begun when the inner solar system was hit by a massive bombardment from space, which also formed the moon's craters Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars.
 Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae — or dark patches — on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts.
 Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned.
 Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way.
 But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower.
 Showers of meteors periodically pass through the area where the Earth is, as gravitational disturbances upset the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy objects on the edge of the solar system.
 They happen on a 26-million year cycle, scientists have said, which coincide with mass extinctions over the last 260-million years Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time.
 The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review.
 The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project.
 Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s.
 Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur Scientists say that the new dinosaur, known as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, “challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology”.
 Florida State University professor of biological science Greg Erickson said: “It creates this natural question.
 How did they survive up here?
” model of the Solar System in a Nevada desert Illustrations of the Earth and moon show the two to be quite close together, Mr Overstreet said.
 This is inaccurate, the reason being that these images are not to scale.
 However, he suggested things might have gone differently if there had been real money at stake.
 “We were playing for play money – that maybe skewed the results slightly.
 I’m used to playing for money … and I probably don’t play my best game at the end of the day if I know if I make a mistake, it isn’t going to cost me frankly,” Mr O’Kearney said.
 He suggested DeepStack’s success was “more significant” than Deep Blue’s because there are more variables in poker than in chess.
 “I guess all of these things are one more further proof that AI is better at almost anything than humans,” he said.
 Poker, he said, was more complicated for a computer to master than chess because of the greater number of possibilities of different situations.
 And playing a more traditional version of the card game with more than just two players would increase the complexity markedly.
 “I don’t think that will ever be solved because the number of possible situations is greater than the number of atoms in the universe,” Mr O’Kearney said.
 wouldn’t play better than the best humans.
 “It’s likely that a computer that was dedicated to that sort of thing would play better than 99.
9 per cent of human players, but I still suspect the very best human players would remain better.
 “But that might be a human fallacy on my part.
” Asked whether computer programs were a problem for the online game, he said: “That’s a massive concern.
 “There’s already a lot of evidence that bots have been programmed to play and are already winning money off human players.
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