AI gamer bots have successfully defeated a team of highly-ranked, 99.95th percentile Defense of the Ancients (Dota) 2 players. Dota is one of the highest paid e-sport games combat games in the world, with prize pools reaching one million dollars. In the game, two teams of characters called “heroes” attempt to defeat the opponent’s home base.
In a tournament performed in front of a live audience and 100,000 livestreamers, the AI team won two-of-three DOTA games rapidly (it only lost when the audience selected its heroes, a lineup that put it at a disadvantage). While evenly matched games normally take around 45 minutes, the AI team won the first game in 21.5 minutes, and the second in just under 25.
According to the co-founder of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, the company is working on AI that can defeat human gamers because the battle experience in Dota is so multifaceted and complex that it approximates the chaos of the real world. “You have imperfect information, you have team work, you have these exponential combinations of different heroes and items, and you have to be able to deal with all of that,” Brockman said at a conference, The Outline reports. The bots essentially have to develop a form of intuition that allows them to improvise in unusual situations and collaborate with one another.
The bots are powered by five AI neural learning networks, which prepped for their game day by playing through 180 years’ worth of games against other bots every day. The victory “is a step towards building AI systems which accomplish well-defined goals in messy, complicated situations involving real humans,” OpenAI wrote. Later this month, the AI bots will complete against a team of professional players in the Dota 2 International championships. Meanwhile,tThe company will continue exploring the far more challenging task of bringing AI skills into the unpredictability of the real world.
