Man v/s AI: Musk's bot won 99.4% Dota 2 games
Last weekend, Elon Musk-backed start-up OpenAI put up its artificial intelligence bot - OpenAI Five - for open Dota 2 matches. The move allowed anyone to try a Dota 2 match against the bot, which has previously defeated world-champion teams. Now, we have the results of those matches, and they show OpenAI Five quite literally obliterated its human competitors. Here are the details.
OpenAI Five won 7,215 games
OpenAI Five bot played as many as 7,257 games in three days - from April 18 to April 21 - and won 7,215 of them. Now, that's a success rate of 99.4% against the humans, which is simply amazing for an artificial intelligence system. To note, the same bot took down a world champion team in two back-to-back games earlier this month.
Here, OpenAI played in competitive or cooperative mode
While playing on the internet, OpenAI Five played either in competitive mode, where it challenged a human, or in a cooperative mode, where it played with one. In fact, out of the 42 competitive games that humans managed to win against OpenAI Five, 10 were won by a single and, presumably, very strong team. Also, only three teams managed to nab three back-to-back games.
Here are the full statistics
How OpenAI Five bot defeated these players?
OpenAI Five bot plays five-on-five Dota 2 games and learns by playing 180 years' worth of games against itself every day. Basically, the start-up uses a reinforcement learning approach, where they drop the bot into the game environment and opt for a trial-and-error approach to help it learn and plan its moves. This is a more dynamic method and allows for continuous performance improvement.
This was OpenAI Five's last demonstration
As VentureBeat reports, this was OpenAI Five's last public match, both against regular and professional players. The company will now focus on upgrading the bot's capabilities and using its strategic learning in other fields. Basically, the idea is, if an AI can beat humans in a game as complex as Dota 2, it can theoretically use the same techniques in other fields too.
Dota 2: A very complex strategy game
Dota 2 makes a very complex online strategy game with 100s of characters and variables. You define characters and skills and then try to use a team of 'heroes' to destroy a large structure called 'Ancient' protected by the enemy. The player has to destroy smaller towers in the enemy's territory to destroy ancient while protecting their own towers and ancient.
