Along with a spectacular victory for this year's The International winners for the DotA 2 World Championships, one of the biggest stories to come out of the largest professional gaming event of the year, is that a newly crafted AI has been beating all of the professionals pitted against it. While we've seen AI's dominate in chess for years and more recently the complicated game of Go, it's now been proved that AI can handle incredibly nuanced games like DotA 2.
Known as the OpenAI, the bot was trained not by programmers, but by playing game after game against itself, refining its actions and learning as it went, much like real players do. It had a little coaching here and there throughout its development, but for the most part it's a self-taught DotA 2 master. It proved this during the event by beating pros like Dendi. Other pros who took it on during the event similarly fell to its skills in the 1v1 arena.
Of course DotA 2 is a team game and it seems likely that a pack of human players would murder a team of the OpenAI that demonstrated such technical skill in single player play. There were also a tonne of specific rules in these games which did limit players somewhat in what they could opt for in terms of character augmentations.
But still, beating high-level pros is a first for an AI.
DotA 2 fans will spot a number of advanced plays very early in the above game, from creep blocking, to last hitting and denying last hits. It even faked out the human player at one point, which drew audible gasps from the crowd.
Open Ai is designed as a general purpose AI platform that is advancing ever faster thanks to its experience in games like DotA 2. It seems only a matter of time before such systems can beat any human player at any game with a little practice.
