Video games and artificial intelligences. It's not the first time they've crossed swords, and it definitely won't be the last. Our curiosity about seeing different engines triumph in popular games is growing, especially when it involves titles used in e-sports. Today, it's the turn of the ever-popular DotA 2, which served as the battleground for OpenAI (an initiative founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman) against a group of high-level players. The only match OpenAI lost was under extremely unfavorable parameters, while in the rest... well, it basically took out the trash.
A History of AI in Gaming
The Deep-Q team decided to train their creation with Atari 2600 games, and once it conquered the main titles, they moved to the nightmare of Montezuma's Revenge, which required a much more elaborate learning process. In Israel's Institute of Technology, someone thought it was a good idea to let an AI train with Mortal Kombat. At the University of Tübingen, the Mario AI Project allowed Nintendo's mascot to learn to play his own game. Regardless of genre or platform, the reality is that artificial intelligences are playing faster and harder every day. They sometimes stumble significantly, like Facebook did in a StarCraft tournament, but they have some truly terrifying advantages. Not to mention that while a human player eats and sleeps, an AI can accumulate years of experience through simulated battles.
The DotA 2 Exhibition Match
The case of OpenAI has gained a lot of attention after defeating a group of players who were part of the professional circuit (i.e., they're not an active Tier 1 team, but they hold their own) in a DotA 2 exhibition, best of three. A year earlier, OpenAI couldn't even play a full match of DotA 2, and its 'experience' was limited to a single hero (Shadow Fiend). The new version, named OpenAI Five, can now participate in five-on-five matches with 18 different heroes, which it chooses based on the opponents' formation. OpenAI managed to annihilate the human team relatively quickly, taking less than half an hour in both matches. As if that weren't enough, OpenAI had time for a little trash talk, saying at the beginning of a match that its win probability was over 95 percent. Ouch.
With the 2-0 secured, the organizers decided to put OpenAI in a tricky situation, and both the audience and the Twitch chat chose a definitely bad team for the AI. The result? OpenAI declared its chances of winning had dropped to 2.9 percent, and despite a heroic defense, the final match went to the human team. If you want to see all the action, you can access the five-hour stream on Twitch by clicking here, and its next activity will be at the International in Vancouver at the end of the month.
