Google’s AlphaGo beats one of the world’s top players in the ancient Chinese board game Go, prompting the question as to whether the program could also beat games of imperfect information like no-limit poker?

10-months ago the quartet of Bjorn Li, Dong Kim, Doug Polk, and Jason Les triumphed in a series of Heads-Up No-Limit Hold’em (NLHE) matches against a computer program known as Claudico.

“I think we can have a new program that can beat humans in a year.” Said Claudico design team member Sam Ganzfried after their defeat.

In the future, we won’t be interested in the Man v Machine debate. That will be old hat. Instead, we will be interested in the titanic tussles of Machine v Machine.