OpenAI Showcases Team of Improved Dota 2 Bots Beating Semi-Pros
OpenAI has developed a team of five enhanced bots for Dota 2 that will compete with a team of professionals on July 28 at the annual major Dota 2 tournament, The International. The bots have already won matches against semi-professionals.
It actually involves five neural networks, a team of five bots called OpenAI Five. This team has already beaten two teams with relatively high rating scores in Dota 2 this month. Also, a team of Valve employees was beaten. OpenAI, an American research company that is partly funded by Elon Musk, wants to compete with the bots during The International on July 28 against a team of five professional Dota 2 players, with the only limitation being a considerably reduced set of heroes. to select from.
With the matches won against semi-professionals earlier this month, more restrictions had been placed on OpenAI Five, so that the bots did not have to deal with the full complexity of a Dota 2 match. For example, the bots could only play five specific heroes and a number of aspects were fully preprogrammed, such as purchasing items and making the various abilities stronger. For example, no wards were allowed to be placed, so that it was not possible to get a view of a certain place on the playing field.
The team of the improved bots with an average reaction time of 80ms was not only able to react to things faster than the human opponents, but also deployed a coordinated tactic to win the matches. For example, one’s own safe lane was regularly sacrificed to attack a comparable lane of the opponents together.
OpenAI Five has been trained for several months by playing against itself every day; in an accelerated way, that was good for 180 years of game time every day. Through trial and error, the AI learns which actions yield a maximum virtual reward. That required quite a bit of computing power: 128,000 regular CPU cores and 256 Nvidia P100 GPUs.
Last year, OpenAI had already developed a bot that could play Dota 2 and even beat a world champion like Dendi, but this was still under quite restrictive circumstances and in a one-on-one situation. In a five-on-five situation, the battle is a lot more complex.