OpenAI & Dota 2: the eSports bot

Google’s achievements in Artificial Intelligence with DeepMind on Go (supposedly the most complicated game there is) have taken over the media, but there’s another phenomenon where there are games with an even greater level of complexity, both in terms of the number of combinations and because they are not played one on one but by teams. This is the case of League of Legends or Dota 2, in the eSports universe.

Did you know that there is an AI initiative that has already created a bot that has won the best Dota 2 professionals in one-on-one games? This is OpenAI, a nonprofit Artificial Intelligence research initiative that aims to promote and develop AI safely for the benefit of humanity. The main founders were Sam Altman and Elon Musk (although the second one is no longer part of the initiative due to possible conflicts of interest with Tesla). Let’s remember that this initiative arises out of the fear of the group of founders to possible future scenarios such as Autonomous Weapons.

Returning to the subject of the bot, it has learned to play this game from scratch and in a self-taught way, without using decision trees or search trees, learning like a human (the same as AlphaGo). In this video you can see how the OpenAI bot wins in 1:1 matches against the best players in the world in Dota 2.

Some comments are very interesting, reflecting on how they’ve learned playing against the bot. As happened as AlphaGo, Artificial Intelligence uses mechanisms, moves and combinations that we humans probably wouldn’t have thought of. Obviously, there are times when humanity wins as in the case of Black^ :)

They are currently training a series of bots to compete against entire teams of humans, they call it the OpenAI Five. What role could bots play in the world of eSports? Could they be the perfect coaches?

In the OpenAI website you have much more information including other videos of other skills “he” is learning, for example his robot Dactyl, has learned to manipulate objects with spectacular dexterity.

#365daysof #futurism #esports #dota2 #AI #day154