OpenAI Five
Ever wonder what it would be like to play a video game against bots that get better each and every time they play? Bots that learn from their mistakes and are built on an AI learning algorithm are becoming a reality.
Open AI is a non profit company founded by Elon Musk (and others) to explore promote and develop AI technologies (in 2015). Open AI delves into a wide variety of topics relating to AI that I may go on to cover in future posts, but specifically I want to talk about Open AI Five their adventure into the video game world and stacking up against the pros.
Open AI Five is a program built to learn, understand, and master DOTA2. They picked DOTA2 to learn on in short due to the complexity and strategy that goes into the game itself. In the average DOTA2 game, 20,000 moves are taken, inferences must be made on incomplete data, around 170,000 actions are taken per player, and the amount of information a human has access to in the game is represented by 20,000. DOTA2 should be complicated for an AI to understand right? To conquer the game they built the bots to learn from their mistakes by keeping track of the action that produce favorable outcomes. It played against itself 180 years worth of games each and every day and using reinforcement learning to keep and build on the relevant results. By gathering all of this data day after day, the bots came up with a solid strategy to win the game. A strategy that many pro teams also use.
Open AI then set out to test their creation. They tested against various human teams to a variety of results. The casual team at the office could be defeated on April 23rd, it took until June 6th until it could beat the good audience members, the valve team, and was able to take games off of the Semi-Pro team.
Impressively the Open AI program was able to come to the biggest tournament of the year The International(TI), a $25 million tournament on Aug 20th, and preform pretty well. It ultimately lost to the Pro players but put up a pretty good fight and I’m sure that it will grow to beat them in the future.
I’m very excited to see these bots learn to play. It was fun to watch them in the side show event at TI and it peaked my interest to investigate further. I’m excited to see them again at this coming year’s TI to see what progress they have made. I hope they have removed the limited hero pool, and the other restrictions that are made on the game when the bots play. Its interesting to just watch them play and see what they do.
Here is the original blog post if you want some more information: https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/
Results from TI 2018
