The following is a conversation with Thomas Sanhom.

He's a professor at Same You and co-creator of La Bradas,

which is the first AI system to be top human players in the game of heads-up no limit Texas Holdum.

He has published over 450 papers on Game Theory and Machine Learning,

including a best paper in 2017 at Nips.

Now renamed to New Rips, which is where I caught up with him for this conversation.

His research and companies have had wide-reaching impact in the real world,

especially because he and his group not only proposed new ideas,

but also build systems to prove that these ideas work in the real world.

This conversation is part of the MIT course on artificial general intelligence and the

artificial intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect

with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman spelled F-R-I-D.

And now here's my conversation with Thomas Sanhom.

Can you describe at the high level the game of poker Texas Holdum heads-up Texas Holdum

for people who might not be familiar with this card game?

Yeah, happy to. So Hedge Up No Limit Texas Holdum has really emerged in the AI community

as the main benchmark for testing these application independent algorithms

for imperfect information game solving. And this is a game that's actually played by humans.

You don't see that much on TV or casinos because, well, for various reasons, but you do see it

in some expert level casinos and you see it in the best poker movies of all time.

It's actually an event in the World Series of Poker, but mostly it's played online.

And typically for pretty big sums of money and this is a game that usually only experts play.

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