An AI has successfully defeated five former pro Dota 2 gamers in a 5v5 showdown dubbed the OpenAI Five Benchmark. The victorious OpenAI bot is made up of five neural networks – which played 180 years of games a day total in preparation for the big match – powered by 256 Nvidia P100 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores.
The match played out last night with humans winning just one of the three games against the OpenAI Five. The first two games the AI came out swinging, and it was only once the audience picked a draft roster in favour of the human team for the third match that the 99.95th percentile human players managed to turn the tide of the game in their favour.
The human team included Blitz, Cap, Fogged, and Merlini – all of which are now casters in the Dota 2 community and have retired from any and all competitive play. Regardless, as ex-pros they were still meant to pose a significant challenge for the AI team, which up until now has been facing off with amateur teams and practicing all on its lonesome.
The AI takes note of every fourth frame, which OpenAI estimates averages to roughly 20,000 moves in a match. Each bot has access to all the information that a human would usually be able to access, including only being able to see the immediate world around their units and buildings.
Each of the five neural networks can’t actually communicate with each other, however, through some algorithmic magic that keeps the bots’ team wellbeing in mind, teamwork is still a big part of the OpenAI Five’s strategies.
Exciting match today! OpenAI Five won first 2 games, and humans won 1 with the audience picking the draft in favor of the humans. Thank you to our fantastic Team Human!
— Christy Dennison (@cbd) August 6, 2018
With all the information available to it the AI can actively learn how to play the game and even develop the sort of deep and aggressive strategies seen in the professional game today. Evidently, the AI has gotten pretty good at it, too. With the AI’s ability to grow and learn new strats currently outpacing early estimates, it may actually put up a good fight against the very tippy top of professional Dota players at The International in late August.