105 - Archive Interview: Michael Bowling, AI poker researcher

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

 

Are you good at bluffing? Do you think you could beat a computer? What if I told you that it was mathematically proven that the computer would beat you? That's what Michael Bowling did for his program that plays heads-up, limit Texas Hold'Em: he proved that it was impossible to do better than draw against it.

Michael is a professor at the University of Alberta, a research scientist at DeepMind, and has been on Scientific American Frontiers, National Geographic Today, and featured in exhibits at the Smithsonian.

This is an interview from an unreleased archive interview from 2016, recorded at the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association annual conference. I was pretty green at this then, but Michael's answers are illuminating and just as useful today despite advancements in computer poker since then. He also talked about work being done on video games, and the conversation about artificial general intelligence that was just starting to become intense around the AI community then.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.