Computer AI Team Beats Humans At DOTA 2

This week it's happened, a machine beat humans at a complex esports game, and we're all doomed. The game is Dota 2, and the machine goes by the name OpenAI Five. The machine is a set of five neural networks, and they've begun beating amateur human teams at Dota 2 without breaking too much of a digital sweat. In the near future, the machines will attempt to beat the real professionals.

OpenAI Five doesn't sit idle in the offseason. Like the true esports mega-minds that compete in the biggest competitions in the world, these machines practice and train in large amounts. According to the creators of OpenAI Five, the machines play 180-YEARS worth of games against itself EVERY DAY. Through self-play, it learns from itself and improves.

Using 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores, it works with a scaled-up version of Proximal Policy Optimization to teach itself new tricks. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a set of codes – a set of reinforcement learning algorithms. With these codes, a machine can learn the ins and outs of a game (software with a goal and set parameters).

"Using a separate [Long Short Term Memory network] for each hero and no human data, it learns recognizable strategies," said a representative of the team at OpenAI behind this project. "This indicates that reinforcement learning can yield long-term planning with large but achievable scale — without fundamental advances, contrary to our own expectations upon starting the project."

Above you'll see an explanation of how this system works and what it's up to now. The human team and the AI team are shown at war with one-another in Dota 2, showing how each reacts in their current state. While you might want to know a little about this game before you see the video above, it's not entirely necessary to appreciate the level of intricacy with which the machine is playing.

For more information on this project, have a peek at OpenAI and dive in deep. There's a lot more information for Dota 2 players as well as those interested in how our AI overlords have already begun their destruction of the human race, from the inside out!