Elon Musk's AI Program Is So Smart It Defeated A Team Of Five Gaming Professionals In DOTA 2

OpenAI, Elon Musk¡¯s AI research group, has been teaching its artificial intelligence system to play the popular PC game Dota 2.

Last year, it was just starting the project from scratch. Now, the AI has advanced to such an extent, it¡¯s beating former pros.

Dota 2 is a game of reflexes, teamwork, and most of all strategic thinking. Five players fight across a map to slowly gain strength, killing opponents over time, to finally destroy enemy tower and finally their home base. It needs quick decision-making to plan fights tactically on the fly, as well as execute them.

Last year, OpenAI¡¯s Dota 2 bot beat a professional player in a simplified game mode in about a third of the map size. Back in May, it had progressed to playing full version matches, but was losing to amateur players within the research team. But this past week, the Dota 2 bots beat a team of professionals ¡ª former pro competitors Ben ¡°Merlini¡± Wu, William ¡°Blitz¡± Lee, Loannis ¡°Fogged¡± Lucas, current pro player David ¡°MoonMeander¡± Tan and regular commentator Austin ¡°Capitalist¡± Walsh.

These are five people that have been playing Dota 2 literally since it first launched. And OpenAI¡¯s bots beat them 2-1.

Watch OpenAI Five Benchmark from OpenAI on www.twitch.tv

There were of course a few stipulations to make the game manageable for the AI. They were all allowed to pick from a narrower pool of 18 heroes, as compared to the over 100 in the game, and item delivery couriers were invulnerable. But it¡¯s still an incredibly impressive feat. After all, the AI has taught the bots to play just by playing against itself. It basically played games against itself over and over, at the rate of about 180 years of learning in a day.

In the first match, the OpenAI Five completely crushed Team Human, not letting them destroy even a single tower. In the second game, the humans made a little progress, destroying one tower before going on to lose the game. In game three, played just as a matter of dogged pride, the humans managed to churn out a narrow win.

It¡¯s an incredible spectacle to watch, as an AI plays a game against human opponents. Even in a professional match, players need to think about what decision to make in each situation, and then verbally coordinate among their teammates to have any chance of winning team fights. With OpenAI¡¯s team however, the AI just doesn¡¯t need any of that. What you see then is a complete lack of any hesitation whatsoever, even if it sometimes didn¡¯t make the best decisions.

The next goal now for OpenAI is to have their neural network take on the best of the best at Valve¡¯s The International 8 tournament later this month. The best Dota 2 teams there will compete for the grand prize, and a likely to be very entertaining sideshow will be some of them facing off against the OpenAI Five.