AI defeats 8 world champions of bridge

Bridge is a card game for 4 people. Two players sitting opposite each other form a pair. The type of card used in this game is the 52 card deck.

(Image: Getty Images)

Startup NukkAI in France, announced the victory of artificial intelligence (AI) on March 25, after concluding a two-day tournament in Paris. The challenge requires the champions to play 800 consecutive games divided into 80 turns, 10 games each.

Each champion and their partner play their own cards against a pair of opponents. These opponents are the world’s best robot champions ever, but are still not recognized as “adept” as humans.

AI software called NooK participated in the card match and won 67/80 turns, or 83%. Jean-Baptiste Fantun, co-founder of NukkAI, said that the company has been developing NooK for 5 years, he is completely confident it will win thousands of matches.

Mathematician Cédric Villani, 2010 Fields Medal winner, calls NukkAI “a great French success story”.

Véronique Ventos, another co-founder of NukkAI, calls NooK the “next generation AI” because it explains its decisions at play. “In Bridge games, you can’t play if you don’t explain. The game is based on communication between partners,” shared Ms. Ventos.

Explainability is a hot topic for AI. Most of what the public still hears about machine learning is based on a black box system like AlphaGo. It cannot explain human decision-making. In contrast, according to Stephen Muggleton, a professor of machine learning at Imperial College London, instead of learning by playing through billions of turns, Nook first learns the rules of the game and then improves its play. yourself through practice. It is a combination of deep learning and rule-based systems. “Nook’s learning method is quite similar to that of humans,” he commented.

Nevena Senior, the British Bridge world champion and one of NooK’s rivals, found that NooK “reads” opponents and is able to analyze their mistakes better than humans. “This is something that humans do after accumulating a lot of experience, and I was surprised to see a robot that mimics typical human skills,” she said.

This is not the first time AI has won matches against humans. In 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated the Korean Go champion Lee Sedol with a score of 4-1. The Korean Baduk Association awarded AlphaGo the highest honor of a Go player.

Huong Dung (According to Guardian)