AI can beat the best chess players in the world. They can even beat the best Go players in the world. So what’s the next milestone for artificial intelligence? Well, it seems Dota 2 is the answer. A bot designed by Elon Musk backed OpenAI took on the best Dota 2 pros at Valve’s ongoing tournament, The International. The bot took on Danil “Dendi” Ishutin, one of the best Dota 2 players in the world, in a best of three 1vs1 tournament. OpenAI is a non-profit AI venture founded by Elon Musk. The company’s goal is to research and build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is safe and can be implemented for benefits to human systems.
“Over the past week, our bot was undefeated against many top professionals including SumaiL (top 1v1 player in the world) and Arteezy (top overall player in the world),” OpenAI wrote in a blog post.
While beating Dota 2 is probably not as big an achievement as overcoming Go, Musk himself tweeted that this is the first time an AI has beat humans at e-sports. Dota 2 is a complex enough game, with myriad characters, abilities and powerups. “Success in Dota requires players to develop intuitions about their opponents and plan accordingly,” OpenAI wrote. The company says its bot has learned “entirely via self-play” to predict the movements of its opponents and improvise its response to “unfamiliar situations”.
In the 1vs1 format, two teams of five play against each other. Players can choose between 113 heroes and hundreds of items. The company is now going to work on creating a team of bots, presumably to enter in co-op tournaments. OpenAI is also inviting people to work on this phase of its project at the moment.