Thursday, at the end of the first of two days of competition organized by the start-up, Nook had done better than the champions in 90% of the 50 games (“segments”) played during the challenge, according to Jean-Baptiste Fantun, the general manager of NukkAI.

"It's really the only robot that can beat champions," confirmed champion Nevena Senior on Thursday evening, among the players invited to Paris for this challenge broadcast and commented live on YouTube.

Nook is "much more advanced" than other robots playing bridge and "very good at detecting the limits of its opponents", also greeted Brad Moss, another player, after a day in front of his microcomputer in the premises of NukkAI .

Nook didn't make a perfect show at bridge, as she only played part of the existing bridge "contracts" (the "three no-trumps").

She also did not play the first part of the game, in which the four players define the contract that will be played by successive and increasing announcements.

But its designers have already proven that they had designed something "very original, very creative", rejoices Cédric Villani, the French deputy and mathematician who came to observe the challenge live.

"It was fascinating to see the players analyze the game of the machine after the fact, and try to improve themselves", commented Mr. Villani, author of a parliamentary report which in 2018 had inspired the French government's strategy on the artificial intelligence.

Nook's secret lies in its "hybrid" character, that is to say its ability to combine the two great traditions of artificial intelligence, "symbolic" intelligence, based on the accumulation of logical rules, and "digital" intelligence, based on the prior ingestion of huge amounts of data by neural networks.

- Collaboration with people -

This hybrid character gives him the possibility of explaining his choices, a challenge for these neural networks which are very efficient but often remain "black boxes", with indecipherable decisions even for their own designers.

Thanks to this ability to explain itself, NukkAI opens a way that could make it possible to have "something that looks more like intelligence than what we have seen in recent years", underlines Cédric Villani.

For Jean-Baptiste Fantun, this "explicability" is fundamental for the human to keep control and not be overtaken by his creature.

“We are not aiming for an artificial intelligence that replaces the human but which collaborates and where the human always retains control”, he explains.

In bridge, the goal is to arrive at an AI "which collaborates with the human, says to him + me I would play such a card, but what do you think, because you may have information that I do not have pas+", like psychological information, explains Véronique Ventos, AI researcher and co-founder of NukkAI.

Explainability is "absolutely necessary" in the field of defence, indicates another deputy who came as an observer, Fabien Gouttefarde, a specialist in defense issues.

"When lethal weapons" using artificial intelligence "are at stake, it is essential to know how they arrive at their decisions", indicates this elected representative from Eure, author two years ago of a report on the "Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems".

NukkAI continues its demonstration on Friday at the Paris headquarters of the Bpifrance bank.

The start-up, which has raised 2 million euros in four years, now wants to move up a gear, and is looking to raise more than 10 million euros to deploy Nook in areas as varied as cybersecurity, education or transport, according to Jean-Baptiste Fantun.

© 2022 AFP