An artificial intelligence has beaten eight world champions at a bridge tournament in Paris.

Bridge is a game that has most similarities with real-life; the information is incomplete, there are partners and opponents and the rules impose some explainability. In short, it is a game most likely to really challenge the abilities of an AI in a match against humans. It’s therefore significant that NooK, an AI model developed by French startup NukkAI, managed to beat eight human world champions in a two-day bridge tournament in Paris. (The Guardian)

A bridge game is a scenario very close to human decision-making because players must react to the actions and behaviour of several other players. Not only did NooK win, it also explained its decisions as it went along.

“What we’ve seen represents a fundamentally important advance in the state of artificial intelligence systems,” said Stephen Muggleton, a professor of machine learning at Imperial College London.

Because of its explainability facet, the AI model developed by NukkAI is what is called a “white box” AI model, as compared to the traditional “black box” systems such as AlphaGo. These black boxes are unable to explain to human beings how decisions are being made, according to Muggleton.

Nevena Senior, a many-times world bridge champion for England and one of NooK’s challengers said: “This is something that humans do after enough experience and I was pleasantly surprised that a robot mimics typical human skills.”

Though the bridge challenge did not include bidding, according to Senior the contracts the humans and NooK were given to play were sufficiently variable and therefore the game became as important as the bidding.

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