Tuomas W. Sandholm
Tuomas W. Sandholm works at the intersection of AI, economics and operations research. His career includes research at Carnegie Mellon and companies that applied optimization to electronic markets. He developed Libratus with Noam Brown, which defeated four professional players in a 2017 heads-up poker contest. Their later system Pluribus achieved strong results in six-player poker in 2019. His broader work includes algorithms for auctions and kidney exchange. His poker results apply to specified game settings.
- Works
- 750
- Citations
- 20,594
- h-index
- 73
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1997–2010
Optimization in electronic markets
Sandholm founded and led CombineNet during 1997–2010. The company commercialized optimization-powered auctions. His research interests link marketplace design with algorithms, strategic reasoning and operations research.
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2010 onward
Algorithms for kidney exchange
His algorithms began running kidney-exchange planning for the United Network for Organ Sharing in 2010.
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2017
Libratus in heads-up poker
CMU announced in January 2017 that Libratus, developed by Sandholm and Noam Brown, defeated four professionals over 120,000 hands of heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em. The developers used strategic computation and refinement during the match. The result applies to that tested game.
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2019
Pluribus in six-player poker
CMU announced in July 2019 that Pluribus, developed with Brown and Facebook AI, performed strongly against professional players in six-player no-limit hold’em. It reports tests with five AI copies against a human and with one AI against five humans.
Sources and credits
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