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from the when-they-came-for-the-eSport-players,-I-said-nothing dept.
In the past hour or so, an AI bot crushed a noted professional video games player at Dota 2 in a series of one-on-one showdowns.
The computer player was built, trained and optimized by OpenAI, Elon Musk's AI boffinry squad based in San Francisco, California. In a shock move on Friday evening, the software agent squared up to top Dota 2 pro gamer Dendi, a Ukrainian 27-year-old, at the Dota 2 world championships dubbed The International.
The OpenAI agent beat Dendi in less than 10 minutes in the first round, and trounced him again in a second round, securing victory in a best-of-three match. "This guy is scary," a shocked Dendi told the huge crowd watching the battle at the event. Musk was jubilant.
OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
According to OpenAI, its machine-learning bot was also able to pwn two other top human players this week: SumaiL and Arteezy. Although it's an impressive breakthrough, it's important to note this popular strategy game is usually played as a five-versus-five team game – a rather difficult environment for bots to handle.
[...] It's unclear exactly how OpenAI's bot was trained as the research outfit has not yet published any technical details. But a short blog post today describes a technique called "self-play" in which the agent started from scratch with no knowledge and was trained using supervised learning over a two-week period, repeatedly playing against itself. Its performance gets better over time as it continues to play the strategy game. It learns to predict its opponent's movements and pick which strategies are best in unfamiliar scenarios.
OpenAI said the next step is to create a team of Dota 2 bots that can compete or collaborate with human players in five-on-five matches. ®
Also covered here (with more vids, including the bout in question):
Ars Technica: Elon Musk's Dota 2 AI beats the professionals at their own game
Technology Review: AI Crushed a Human at Dota 2 (But That Was the Easy Bit)
TechCrunch: OpenAI bot remains undefeated against world's greatest Dota 2 players
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @01:43PM (4 children)
Even if humans had access to the said raw data, I doubt their performance would go up (it'll probably go down)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @01:59PM (2 children)
If they had access to it in a format directly accessible to their brain (via direct brain interface), then I'm sure their performance would go up. Of course to date we don't know how the brain encodes such information, so even if we assume the hardware side were completely solved, we still cannot give the brain access to it. I'm sure if the computer program would have access to the extra data only via an OCR program that additionally during its run time blocked the code examining the game situation, the computer's performance in the game would also go down considerably.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:47PM (1 child)
You can basically call vision "a format directly accessible to the brain", as we've lots of special purpose hardware (wetware?) to deal with it. Probably presenting the information in any way that doesn't directly stimulate one of the senses would require a LOT more work on the part of the brain.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @07:10PM
There is basic stuff the ai can have access to like rng seed (thus what item will appear where next). That is why you can see bots beat mariokart in minutes by waiting to get the item box at just the right moment, so they get exactly what is needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @05:22PM
But computer-assisted humans could win.
e.g. the computer does the stuff computers have been better at and the humans do the stuff humans are still better at.