A bot from Elon Musk-backed start-up OpenAI has beaten one of the top players at the Valve’s yearly Dota 2 tournament: The International. This came as a surprise setting a new best player in the world and a new feature for artificial intelligence.
According to the engineers from OpenAI, the bot learned how to death Dota 2 pros in two weeks of real-time learning. However, they say that during that period the bot got a lifetime experience by using a neural network judging. Elon Musk celebrated this accomplishment on the field of Artificial intelligence since it is the first time this type of technology is capable of beating pros in competitive e-sports.
“OpenAI first ever to defeat world’s best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go” twitted Elon Musk last night.
Dota 2 is taken down by artificial intelligence
Dota 2 is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed by Valve Corporation. It is the sequel to Defense of the Ancients (DotA), which is a mod created for Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion pack, The Frozen Throne.
Dota 2 is a complex game that is played between two five-player-teams. Each one of the teams must defend their own separate base on the map. All of the players have powerful characters – which are called “heroes” – and all of them have independent controls and unique abilities. The teams who wins is the one who manages to destroy first a large structure located at the base of the other team which is called the “Ancient.” The game allows the community of players to create custom game modes, maps, and hero cosmetics.
The game features 113 playable heroes. As well, there are a lot of items that can boost the capabilities of the heroes.
Dendi: The bot feels a little like a human, but a little like something else
Right now, teams from across the globe are created to play in leagues and tournaments. The largest of them is known as The International, which is produced annually by Valve and held at the KeyArena in Seattle.
This year, Dota lovers were able to witness how one of the top players of the game, Danylo “Dendi” Ishutin, got crushed in a live 1-vs-1 match with the bot of OpenAI.
Dota 2 pro lost twice to the bot. Then the Ukrainian player expressed astonishment regarding the capabilities of a bot to play and how it was able to be better than a human. He said that the bot was too strong and that he might need to practice more now.
The tournament took place in Seattle on August 7, with a $10.7 million grand prize. The bot wasn’t eligible for prize money.
Another success to Elon Musk’s tech empire
Elon Musk founded OpenAI as a non-profit research company that looks forward to creating friendly artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of humanity and to prevent AI from destroying the world. In fact, Musk told to a group of US governors last month that artificial intelligent was a fundamental risk to civilization as we know it. Scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell believe it to be true. They consider that advanced AI could be able to redesign itself leading to an unstoppable “intelligence explosion” that might produce the end of humanity. On the other hand, some influential people in the tech business have rejected Musk’s affirmations regarding the future of AI, for example, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
The truth is that OpenAI wants to promote a long-term impact of AI that is also positive and responsible.
Seeing that the bot was able to beat the best human players of the Dota 2 tournament, it might lead to think that Musk was right when he said that AI is more dangerous than North Korea. However, engineers say that the participation of the bot in the e-game competition only shows how harmless AI can be.
“Our bot is trained entirely through self-play. 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,” said Greg Brockman, Open AI co-founder and chief technology officer.
Greg posted a video on YouTube to explain the team’s methods to train the bot for Dota 2. He said it was about time to test the bot in Dota’s championship: The International
The team intends to extend the capabilities of the bot in Dota 2, so it can compete across the full game in a 5-vs-5 match by next year’s tournament. It the bot will be able to do that by next year is still unknown; however, it showed that bots are not inferior to expert human players.
Source: CNN