New Delhi, India

Eight world champions in the card game bridge have been defeated by an artificial intelligence during a two-day tournament in Paris.

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The announcement was made by French startup NukkAI which was co-founded in March 2018 by Véronique Ventos and Jean-Baptiste Fantun.

The Paris-based private lab chose the bridge as it is the game that has most similarities with real-life: the information is incomplete, there are partners and opponents and the rules impose some explainability. 

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It had introduced the NukkAI challenge which required the human champions to play 800 consecutive deals divided into 80 sets of 10.

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

“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.

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“Most of what the general public have heard in recent years about machine learning is based on black box systems such as AlphaGo, which is unable to explain to human beings how decisions are being made,” he added.

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“In bridge, you can’t play if you don’t explain,” said NukkAI’s other co-founder Véronique Ventos.

“The pendulum is swinging towards these kinds of methods,” says Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University in Rhode Island. 

“Not being able to tell people what’s going on just doesn’t work in our societies.”

NukkAI aims to bring transparency to the Artificial Intelligence models, facilitate compliance, improve model performance and reduce ethical bias.

Their products include NuX, an interactive AI tool customised for each domain, proposes efficient solutions while providing explanations in natural language adapted to user’s profile. 

It already been customised for different domains: aeronautics, education, cybersecurity, defence, etc. As NuX improves performance while responding to responsibility and transparency issues, this generic tool has potential in virtually all business verticals.

(With inputs from agencies)