Tuomas Sandholm

Tuomas Sandholm was born on December 21, 1968, in Helsinki, Finland.⁠[1]

He grew up on Tammisalo, a small island on the east side of Helsinki connected to the mainland by bridges. His father, Markus, a pharmacologist and toxicologist at the University of Helsinki, died in 1999; his mother, Leena, was a dentist specializing in periodontology and a researcher. At 13 he took a week-long computer class and took to programming.⁠[2]

In 1987 he placed 12th at the windsurfing world championships; from August 1987 to July 1988 he did his obligatory military service at Finland’s Air Force Academy, becoming a pilot second lieutenant.⁠[3]

In the 1980s he studied industrial engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology, now part of Aalto University; he has done AI research since 1989, and after earning a Master of Science in Engineering in 1991 he left immediately for doctoral studies in the United States.⁠[4]

He went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to work with Victor Lesser, a pioneer of multiagent systems, and there met Christina Fong, then a doctoral student, whom he later married.⁠[2]

He received master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science there in 1994 and 1996, then taught at Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant and associate professor until 2000 before joining Carnegie Mellon University in 2001.⁠[5]

From 1997 until its acquisition in 2010 he founded and led CombineNet, which ran more than 800 of the world’s largest combinatorial auctions, with over $60 billion in total spend and over $6 billion in savings.⁠[6]

In 2003 he received the Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) for his contributions to computational economics and to negotiation and coalition formation among computationally bounded agents.⁠[5]

On October 27, 2010, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) began a national kidney paired-donation pilot whose first match run, using CMU algorithms whose development he led, matched seven transplant candidates with compatible donors. He said his team had worked on this for six years and that a unified nationwide exchange yields significantly better solutions than multiple separate ones.⁠[7]

In 2016 the University of Zurich’s Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work at the intersection of computer science and game theory, particularly the design of electronic markets.⁠[1]

On January 30, 2017, Libratus, overseen by him and his Ph.D. student Noam Brown, finished a 20-day competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh leading four top professionals by $1,766,250 in chips over about 120,000 hands. He said, “The best AI’s ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans.”⁠[8]

In July 2017 UCSF Medical Center performed what is believed to be the world’s first kidney-liver swap, an idea drawn from a paper on multi-organ exchange by him and his former student John Dickerson; he learned of it only when a case report was published in April 2019. UNOS has used his algorithms for its national kidney exchange since 2010, and the first kidney swaps resulting from his algorithms took place in 2006.⁠[9]

In December 2017 his paper with BrownBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry on a key component of Libratus, “Safe and Nested Subgame Solving for Imperfect-Information Games,” won one of three Best Paper awards at NIPS 2017; its new subgame-solving techniques outperformed prior methods in theory and in practice.⁠[10]

That month the two published a paper in Science describing Libratus, writing that its techniques are “largely domain independent” and can be applied to other strategic imperfect-information interactions.⁠[11]

In early 2018 he founded Strategy Robot to adapt his lab’s game-playing technology for war games and military strategy and planning; in August 2018 the company received a two-year contract of up to $10 million with the US Army in support of the Defense Innovation Unit. Greg Allen, an adjunct fellow at the think tank CNAS, said such technology could make war-gaming more useful but would likely remain just one component of strategy planning.⁠[12]

On December 28, 2018, he appeared on Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry’s podcast in an episode on poker and game theory. The episode description introduced him as co-creator of Libratus and author of more than 450 papers on game theory and machine learning.⁠[13]

In July 2019 Pluribus, developed by him and Brown, who had joined Facebook AI, defeated professionals including Darren Elias and Chris Ferguson at six-player no-limit Texas Hold’em; the paper “Superhuman AI for Multiplayer Poker” was published in Science on July 11. He called it a milestone in artificial intelligence and game theory that had been open for decades.⁠[14]

The researchers decided not to release Pluribus’s code for fear it could be used to empty the coffers of online poker companies. Sandholm called the result “mind-blowing.”⁠[15]

In autumn 2020 Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry named him one of its 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs for his work on Strategy Robot; in December the AAAI announced that he would receive the 2021 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award.⁠[4]

He received the IJCAI Marvin Minsky Medal in 2019, the IJCAI John McCarthy Award in 2021, the AAAI Award for AI for the Benefit of Humanity in 2023, and Finland’s Alfred Kordelin Prize in 2025.⁠[3]

As of August 2023 he was Angel Jordan University Professor of Computer Science at CMU and co-director of CMU AI, and founder and CEO of Strategic Machine and Optimized Markets.⁠[6]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]