For professional Dota 2 players, going head-to-head with a bot works as a warmup. The bots are considered “limited AI” and are beatable for the average player — even more so for professionals. The notion of every bot being an easy defeat changed last week with an OpenAI-developed bot defeating the best Dota 2 players in the world.
OpenAI, a company backed by Elon Musk, created the bot from scratch, allowing it to basically start out by playing itself. “Our bot is trained entirely through self-play,” OpenAI co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman said. “It starts out completely random with no knowledge of the world, and simply plays against a copy of itself — which means it always has an evenly matched opponent.”
Dota 2 is essentially a complex game of capture-the-flag in which players can play with powerful “heroes.” It’s usually played with two teams of five players, but the OpenAI bot was trained for 1v1 to play against the very best in the world.
“Watching the replay, honestly I just learned something so it’s pretty helpful,” Artour Babaev, the world’s best Dota 2 player, said while playing against the bot.
Would like to express our appreciation to Microsoft for use of their Azure cloud computing platform. This required massive processing power.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2017
The bot’s skills were put to the test at Dota 2’s world championships, The International. The main attraction featured a best-of-five series between OpenAI’s creation and the Ukrainian Danil Ishutin — a professional player himself.
The competitors were introduced in front of a roaring crowd, similar to something you may have seen out of the Rocky franchise.
The bot made quick work of “Dendi,” as he’s otherwise known. Dendi surrendered after just two rounds.
Bot is really fun and challenging to play against
I am sure it is possible to beat it . But it have no room for even slight mistakes
— Danil Ishutin (@DendiBoss) August 12, 2017
Successful Dota 2 players are able to anticipate what their opponent will do before they do it. It turns out that OpenAI created a machine capable of reading its opponents better than Peyton Manning at the line of scrimmage.
This is reportedly merely the beginning of the company’s work with AI projects.