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OpenAI's Dota 2 AI Beats Professional Player on Stage at TI7, Remains Undefeated

This marks the first time Elon Musk's AI side project has taken the stage at an esports event.

Asif Khan

August 11, 2017 7:30 PM

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Artificial Intelligence is certainly at the forefront of many technology revolutions. Elon Musk's Tesla Motors is using machine learning and AI to figure out automated transport, but another one of his side projects, OpenAI, has been focused on enacting a path to safe artificial intelligence. The first step is obvious, create a Dota 2 AI to compete with the best players in the world. That's exactly what happened today on the stage at the Dota 2 International Championships. 

In a few minutes, watch our Dota 2 AI play live on main stage at The International: https://t.co/mjTTPTlPh5

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) August 11, 2017

Open AI posted some more information on their official blog.

"We’ve created a bot which beats the world’s top professionals at 1v1 matches of Dota 2 under standard tournament rules. The bot learned the game from scratch by self-play, and does not use imitation learning or tree search. This is a step towards building AI systems which accomplish well-defined goals in messy, complicated situations involving real humans.

Today we played Dendi on mainstage at The International, winning a best-of-three match. 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).

Dota 1v1 is a complex game with hidden information. Agents must learn to plan, attack, trick, and deceive their opponents. The correlation between player skill and actions-per-minute is not strong, and in fact, our AI’s actions-per-minute are comparable to that of an average human player.

Success in Dota requires players to develop intuitions about their opponents and plan accordingly. In the above video you can see that our bot has learned — entirely via self-play — to predict where other players will move, to improvise in response to unfamiliar situations, and how to influence the other player’s allied units to help it succeed.

The full game of Dota is played by two teams of five. Each player chooses from a hundred heroes and hundreds of items. Our next step is to create a team of Dota 2 bots which can compete and collaborate with the top human teams. If you’d like to work on the next phase of the project, consider joining OpenAI."

Please take a look at the full 1v1 Dota 2 match between OpenAI and Dendi that took place today on the stage at TI7.

Congratulations to OpenAI's Dota 2 AI. It certainly has learned how to do it for Shacknews. Oh no, we're doomed! We should have listened to Elon Musk's comments on the dangers of AI. 

Asif Khan

CEO/EIC/EIEIO

Asif Khan is the CEO, EIC, and majority shareholder of Shacknews. He began his career in video game journalism as a freelancer in 2001 for Tendobox.com. Asif is a CPA and was formerly an investment adviser representative. After much success in his own personal investments, he retired from his day job in financial services and is currently focused on new private investments. His favorite PC game of all time is Duke Nukem 3D, and he is an unapologetic fan of most things Nintendo. Asif first frequented the Shack when it was sCary's Shugashack to find all things Quake. When he is not immersed in investments or gaming he is a purveyor of fine electronic music. Asif also has an irrational love of Cleveland sports.