In Canada, two professional poker players beat a computer in four games, in what was considered the first poker championship where men faced a machine. Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, two of the best poker players in the world, ended up as the winners in Vancouver, facing a program called Polaris.

However, these men’s job was not easy. The last game, which lasted until Tuesday night, was crucial. In the previous three games, that were played on Monday and Tuesday, there had been a victory for the human players and another one for the machine, the third ended up as a tie.

Tons of IT experts and some spectators that were observing the battle burst into exclamations when the player won. “I’m happy is over”, Ali Eslami said, since it had been the most exhausting game of his career. Eslami, a former computer advisor, praised the machine and the programmers.

“I’m surprised we won, it’s so good already that it will be hard to beat it in the future when the scientists improve the programming of Polaris”. The scientists announced the competition as a milestone for artificial intelligence, as it was in 1997 when the computer Deep Blue defeated the Russian genius Garry Kasparov in a chess game.