Say hello to our new AI overlords.
AI research organization OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot team has just crushed The International 8 winners OG 2-0 in a best of three series.
The OpenAI Five Finals, held at San Francisco last weekend, was the finale to a series of public demonstrations by the research organization to provide wider and better awareness about its artificial intelligence projects.
The event saw top-tier Dota 2 team OG battle it out with ‘Five’, a team of bots trained using deep learning algorithms and neural networks, having played over 45,000 years worth of Dota 2 games in ten months.
The bots used reinforcement learning, a technique that features a randomized approach to teach the AI to adapt to different situations, allowing it to improve through a set of given variables that become more complex over time.
“We didn’t code it how to play. We coded it how to learn,” said Greg Brocman, OpenAI Five CTO.
With only 17 heroes available for drafting out of the 100-ish available, the games were pretty much dominated by the bots. The first match went on for 40 minutes, while the second took less than 20 minutes before OG conceded. In the end, the TI winners started messing around with items like Tango and the Enchanted Mango during the final moments of game 2, perhaps as a way of appeasing the godlike bots.
Lastly, OpenAI announced that it will open what it calls the “Arena”, a platform for the public to experience playing with the AI system, either as allies or as opponents.
Interested players can sign up to get access, with the server going online for three days starting on Thursday, April 18th at 9PM ET (note: You will need a working Steam account to sign up). Based on the number of registrations, OpenAI will allocate computing power for it to handle simultaneous sessions to make sure gamers get the best experience.
