Fast, creative, smart — great gamers are all these things. Somebody has to teach machines how to keep up. That somebody is Ilya Sutskever and his team at OpenAI. Sutskever, co-founder and research director of OpenAI, and his team at Open AI are developing AI bots smart enough to battle some of the world’s best human gamers. In August, OpenAI Five, a team of five neural networks, were defeated by some of the world’s top professional players of Dota 2, the wildly popular multiplayer online battle arena game.
It was a leap for OpenAI Five to even be playing a nearly unrestricted version of Dota 2 at a professional level, which took place at Valve’s International competition in Vancouver — a world series of esports played for tens of millions of dollars. That’s because Dota 2 is an extremely complex game. Players can unleash an enormous number of tactics, strategies and interactions in the quest to win. The game layout — only partially observable — requires both short-term tactics and long-term strategy, as each match can last 45 minutes. “Professional players dedicate their lives to this game,” said Sutskever. “It’s not an easy game to play.”
