Facebook doesn’t just own the world’s largest social network — it may also own the world’s best poker player.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) program the company built with Carnegie Mellon University called “Pluribus” recently beat five poker professionals in a six-player Texas hold’em tournament. After 10,000 hands, the system averaged profits of about US$1,000 per hour using US$1 chips, a “decisive margin of victory,” according to a Facebook blog post.

AI has been besting humans at poker for a couple of years, but previous programs could compete with just a single player at a time. Given the complexities that come with poker, including techniques like bluffing, beating five humans in a single game is a significant milestone, Facebook said.

“No other game embodies the challenge of hidden information quite like poker, where each player has information (his or her cards) that the others lack,” Facebook wrote in a blog post. “A successful poker AI must reason about this hidden information and carefully balance its strategy to remain unpredictable while still picking good actions.”

Noam Brown, the company researcher who led the card-playing work, said that Facebook AI Research is looking at AI more broadly, with the hope of applying its findings to industrywide problems. Many challenges facing AI programs, like navigating a self-driving car through traffic or understanding human negotiations, still remain.(SD-Agencies)