OpenAI Five Defeats Human Dota 2 Professionals Once Again

Elon Musk’s AI research organization, Open AI, which trains its artificial intelligence system to play Dota 2, has defeated a world champion e-sports team.

The competition, dubbed the OpenAI Five Finals, was held in San Francisco. The human competitors included five top Dota 2 pros from team OG, which won the coveted e-sports prize last year by winning the premier annual Dota 2 tournament “The International.”

Team OG faced OpenAI Five bots in a best-of-three contest where the bots won the first two matches. The matches were played in Captain’s Draft mode, where each team can ban characters to prevent the other from selecting them.

It is worth noting that OpenAI Five won the second match in just about 20 minutes — that is roughly half the first game’s length.

All OpenAI Five bots have been trained on the same deep reinforcement learning techniques and are controlled independently through different layers of the same system.

In reinforcement learning, the AI is introduced into the game environment without a prior understanding of how the game works. It is basically a trial and error approach which leads to self-improvement and learning.

Given that Dota 2 is a complex strategy game which involves multiple characters, screens, and options along with a huge number of variables, it makes a good test bed for AI.

This isn’t the first time OpenAI has defeated human gamers in a game. Back in August last year, OpenAI Bots thrashed a team of Dota 2 professionals.

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