Researchers for the University of Alberta have designed a poker-playing program that, according to them, could defeat two of the best professional poker players in the world. The developers of the program, called Polaris, have defied Phil Laak and Ali Eslami to 2,000 hands of Texas Hold’em.

“We have developed a format that has helped us factor out luck and make it into a scientific experiment to determine how good humans are relative to the best program in the world,” Jonathan Schaeffer, leader of the computer science team that designed the program, said. “The goal is to eventually produce a poker program that is stronger than all players.”

The $50,000 man-versus-machine poker match will be played on July 23 and 24 and it will be an important contribution to studies about artificial intelligence. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference in Vancouver also supports the event.

Nowadays, Texas Hold’em is considered the most popular variation of poker and is played by millions of people around the world. The popularity of the game is mainly due to the dozens of television programs that feature Texas Hold’em tournaments.