A startup company’s bot has defeated a “Dota 2” professional. Despite this, the bot doesn’t even know the rules of Dota!
At the eSports tournament The International 2017 (TI7), it wasn’t just about fair matches between humans, but also about the presentation of a very special bot. The startup company OpenAI showcased its artificial intelligence and aimed to demonstrate the capabilities of their AI by competing against some of the best Dota 2 players in the world.
“You haven’t played against something like this bot before,” says Greg from OpenAI. “We didn’t design it to understand the rules of Dota.”
Instead, a different approach was taken, as the researchers describe:
“We simply let it play nearly endless 1vs1 matches against itself and then told it what good and bad behavior was. And now we wanted to see how well the bot can perform against the best players in the world.”
At TI7, the bot then faced Danylo Ishutin, better known in the scene as Dendi. You can watch the live match here.
Ultimately, the bot was successful and managed to take down one of the best Dota 2 players. Dendi himself commented on his defeat with “[The bot] feels a bit human, but also a bit like something else” – it’s hard to describe that any more creepily.
However, it should be noted that the developer’s website states that the bot was “developed in collaboration with Valve.” It is quite possible that the AI has a bit more insider knowledge than a player could ever have. The developers claim that the bot acts in many ways, such as the APM (Actions/Clicks per minute), like an average player.
Blizzard is also working on a “super-bot” – but it’s still in its infancy.
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