[1] Polaris is a composite program consisting of a number of bots, including Hyperborean08, the winner of the limit equilibrium series in the 2008 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Computer Poker Competition.
[2][3] Polaris requires little computational power at match time, so it is run on an Apple MacBook Pro laptop during competitions.
On July 23–24, 2007, Polaris played against poker professionals Phil Laak and Ali Eslami at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Vancouver, B.C.
The two players were in separate rooms to eliminate the chance of the audience revealing information about the hands, which would be especially problematic in a duplicate match.
One of the lost matches was against a learning variant which tried to switch between a few styles of play, while all of the remainder were against large, static, randomized sets of rules which approximate a pair of Nash equilibrium strategies.