OpenAI BOTs will be competing at the DOTA 2 internationals!!!

Hey Steemians! Hope that you all had a nice Saturday!

Today we are going to talk about the OpenAI participating at the DOTA 2 Internationals competition next month! In this article, I am going to discuss what is OpenAI, DOTA 2 and why DOTA 2 participating to the Internationals competition is a big deal and what to expect from it!

What is Open AI?

OpenAI is a nonprofit company that was partly funded by Elon Musk and other entrepreneurs in 2015. They pledged about 1 billion dollar to the company. The goal of the company is to build beneficial artificial intelligence (AI) for the humanity. Musk took the initiative to fund the company partly because he had concern related to the future of AI ethics. He wanted to make sure that (AI) had a good impact on human beings. [1]

One of the strategy of the company is to be completely open source. Hence, Musk believes that by developing open source AI algorithms and softwares, knowledge about AI can be democratized to the maximum extent possible. Hence, they frequently organize AI competitions where anyone around the world can participate and they of course post the best resulting AI algorithms so that everyone can benefit from them.

OpenAI is well known in the AI community for having created the software called “gym”, which contains virtual environments where you can train your AI algorithm (I will talk more about this on my future post on reinforcement learning please see my upcoming schedule here for further details [2]). Needless to say that OpenAI gym is of course open source. Many of the environments released by OpenAI are video game environments (Sonic, Atari 2D, DOTA 2 … ). The more complex the environment, the better it is to train the AI algorithm. Since DOTA 2 is considered to be a very complex game, it is a very well suitable environment to train an AI. AI algorithms trained from OpenAI can have applications in many industries: video games, medicine, self driving cars etc …

What is DOTA 2?

Defense of the ancients also known as DOTA 2 is a very popular multiplayer online arena (MOBA) game. Its community is huge. There is more than 10 millions of people who play DOTA 2 [3].

The goal of the game is quite simple. A team of 5 heroes compete against another team of 5 for whoever will first destroy the opponent’s ancient (some kind of large structure) [7]. Every team’s base is protected by multiple towers that the opposite team has to destroy in order to get to the base. On top of that, every team has small fighters called creeps whose goal is to attack the opponent’s towers as well as the opponents themselves. Every hero has a set of power and abilities that he can unlock by gaining levels (level 25 is the maximum level). On top of that, if he earns money, he can purchase different medical, fighting or magical items depending on his strategy and what he intends to do.

DOTA 2 is a very complex game for many many reasons. First of all, the gamer needs to have very quick reflexes (the more competitive are the other players, the faster you have to be). In MOBA games, the pace of a player is quantified in apm (action per minute). And in addition in DOTA 2, one of the ways to measure the effectiveness of a player is by measuring his (assists + kills) / death ratio. The player needs to communicate with his teammates and needs to constantly be aware of what they are doing. The team needs to come up with some good strategy, depending on the other team’s heroes as well as the items that they have purchased. Needless to say that a DOTA 2 player always needs to anticipate what the other team is going to do. Because there are so many heroes abilities and items that he can purchase, there are so many combinations possible in DOTA 2. It is estimated that a player requires about a year of consistent playing in order to be really solid with DOTA 2 basics.

What to expect from the DOTA 2 Internationals competition?

The DOTA 2 internationals is the most prestigious DOTA 2 competition worldwide. Its prize pool is insane. Last year it was about $24,787,916 [4]!!!!!

OpenAI made a BOT last year that was able to beat Dendi, who was considered to be one of the best DOTA 2 players. [5]

The artificial intelligence that is being developed by Open AI to beat DOTA 2 professional players is called : OpenAI reinforcement learning policy optimization. [6]They ran it on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores. One of the advantages is that it allowed it to train 180 years worth of games every day against itself. The results are already promising since the OpenAI BOT team was able to beat very good DOTA 2 amateur players. We will talk more in deep about Reinforcement learning and policy optimization in a future post.

I think that there is a lot to expect from this upcoming competition and if the BOT team was able to beat the best human team at the tournament, that would show tremendous AI improvements. First of all, it would be very good for DOTA 2 players since they would have better BOTs to train with. Also, the entire field of video games would highly benefit from this of course because better games with stronger BOTS would be made since the AI would demonstrate long- term planning. In another posts, we will discuss the possible applications of this new AI algorithm in other industries.

So that was it guys! Hope that you guys like the post and let me know what you guys think of the Open AI. I will see you tomorrow for the next post! :)

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

[2] https://steemit.com/blog/@juv79505/updates-on-the-channel

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/17/7628755/dota-2-now-has-over-10-million-players

[4] http://dota2.prizetrac.kr/international2018

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-international-dota-2-openai-bot-beats-dendi-2017-8

[6] https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/

[7] https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Ancient_(Building)

Pictures

Picture 1 was taken from https://goo.gl/GSYRbZ

Picture 2 was taken from https://goo.gl/7xQpUE

Picture 3 was taken from https://goo.gl/vCgMMa

Picture 4 https://goo.gl/G9bbJj

Picture 5 was taken from https://goo.gl/UdVSB8

Picture 6 was taken from https://goo.gl/1gXrBw

juv79505 sincerely thank you for reading this article. Please feel free to comment below in case you have ideas, questions, suggestions or simply want to criticize this article. Also, note that all pictures used in this article were extracted from the google section “pictures labeled for commercial reuse”. Stay tuned for more articles on health, environment, artificial intelligence, video games, technology in general, books, graphic novels, geography, history, sports and much more!

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