The annual eSports tournament for the video game Dota 2, The International, is just around the corner and one of the top teams to compete in it won't be consisted of humans. Yes, you read that right. Don't worry the aliens have not yet learned to play video games; so we do with our robots. a group of artificial intelligence bots.
Founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI has already been taking on the top Dota 2 players with artificial intelligence bots since last year. Now, they have decided to come up with a group of these AI bots in an exhibition match at the Dota 2 world championship.
OpenAI taught the artificial intelligence (AI) to coordinate all the five bots in the team.
At any given time, a character of the game is capable of making one out of 1,000 actions. The bots will then have to make effective decisions while playing the game after processing near about 20,000 values that represent what is going on in the game. In chess, the estimated number of probable actions is 35. So, essentially, it's more complicated than the Deep Blue supercomputer, which had beaten chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1996.
In order to train its artificial intelligence system, OpenAI made use of the reinforcement learning. It's basically a trial-and-error method, where the AI improves over time and becomes a more focused player than being one that acts randomly.
OpenAI runs the Dota 2 game on over 100,000 CPUs and to learn, the AI plays 180 years' worth of games a day. Although the humans' learning techniques are different than the bots and that's an advantage for the human players, the bots have some advantages as well. They have an 80ms reaction time, which is much faster than that of the humans. They are also capable of performing 150-170 actions a minute, which is at par with the best human players.
The downside for the bots are that they are only capable of using five of the game's 115 characters and also playing against a team that consists of those same characters.
Before the international event, OpenAI would play a top team on July 28 and it will be streamed on Twitch.
