An artificial intelligence from the OpenAI project has defeated the pro-gamer team OG in DOTA 2. However, some limitations had to be imposed in the game.
Who fought against each other? In a friendly match on April 13, 2019, the champion team OG competed against five special bots.
OG is somewhat like the reigning world champions of DOTA 2. They won The International in August 2018, a massive tournament with a prize pool of over 25 million US dollars.
The bots were operated by the artificial intelligence developed by the OpenAI project. The OpenAI project was originally initiated among others by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
A demonstration of this AI took place at The International 2017, where it defeated pro-gamers like Dendi in 1v1 matches .
For this match, the AI learned to play DOTA 2 in teams and demonstrated what it can do in the “Best-of-three” tournament.
What strategy does the AI use? The bots won the first game against the pro-gamers by using several aggressive strategies. This is referred to as “Snowballing” and it is based on the principle that the first kills in a match provide the foundation for victory.
While humans ignored their losses, the AI revived its fallen heroes early in the game by spending in-game money.
This is usually considered a “Noob Move.” Greg Brockman, one of the developers of OpenAI, stated that humans tend to plan in the long term and work towards “Late Game.”
We see this happen in test games all the time: the bots buy back, the humans laugh, and then the humans lose. Hard to know if it’ll happen here too…
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) April 13, 2019
The AI gained an advantage early in the matches through the revivals of the heroes, allowing them to gain more and more ground.
The AI also won the second game. It defeated team OG almost twice as fast as in the first match.
These were the special conditions for the matches: However, special conditions were necessary to enable the matches against the AI.
The number of variables, meaning the combinations of characters, abilities, items, etc., in a DOTA2 match is virtually infinite. To avoid overloading the computational capacity and memory load of the AI, both teams were only allowed to choose from 17 heroes.
But even well-known eSports analysts like Rod Breslau have wondered how AI will evolve in the future.
Furthermore, the game mode “Captain’s Draft” was used and the summoning and illusions features were disabled.
How were the reactions? The guys from OG took the defeat with humor. They referred to themselves as #TeamHuman and promised on Twitter to become stronger in the future.
This is not the first time that an AI wins against real players in a game. It started with chess and has expanded to other games, such as StarCraft 2.
Nevertheless, fans and other professionals were surprised by the outcome. DOTA2 player and AI specialist Mike Cook remarked on Twitter:
It is interesting to observe these team fights. How humans and bots initiate a confrontation and how the bots respond (or do not). […] What would we ideally expect from the bots here? To anticipate and respond to the human strategy? In this case, it was neither one nor the other.
But even well-known eSports analysts like Rod Breslau have wondered how AI will evolve in the future.
