AI defeats top human gamer in Dota 2 tournament

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A robot defeated a professional human player in Dota 2 eSports championship tournament on Friday.

Robots have stepped into eSport, after defeating the world’s best humans at classic games like chess and Go.

On the stage of The International, an annual Dota 2 eSports championship tournament on Friday, the "world-best" professional human player Danylo “Dendi” Ishutin, lost his crown in a 1-vs-1 game to his opponent, a bot.

The bot, created by an Elon Musk-backed non-profit startup named OpenAI, took down Dendi in the first match in about 10 minutes. “Please, stop bullying me,” said Dendi to the bot during a round.

Resigned from the second match, Dendi declined to play the third.

AI computer program "AlphaGo" from Google's Deepmind has beaten top players in the world in board game Go. /AFP Photo

"It kind of uses any small hole you let him, he doesn’t hesitate (to attack it)," Dendi, who is estimated to have earned 735,449.40 US dollars in winnings in his career according to Business Insider.

Engineers from OpenAI said it took about two weeks for the system to learn enough to beat Dota 2 pros, which is the level it showed during the tournament in Seattle.

"We've coached it to learn just from play against itself, we didn’t have it learn from a human expert," said OpenAI engineer. "From the very beginning, it just kept playing against a copy of itself. It started from complete randomness, and then it made a minimal improvement, and eventually just at pro level."

The system of the bot might be used in the real world rather than computer games. "What we've built here is a general learning system, which is still limited in some ways. But it is capable enough to beat the best human pros at Dota," said Greg Brockman, co-founder, and CTO of OpenAI.

"This is a step towards building more general systems, they can learn complicated, messy and important real-world task, like being a surgeon," he added after the tournament.

Screenshot from Elon Musk's twitter.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla tweeted about the "human vs bot" game on Saturday, claiming that OpenAI's bot was the “first ever to defeat world’s best players in competitive eSports.”

The San Francisco-based startup is extending its ambition to next year's tournament, said Brockman, which the bot will play in 5-vs-5 Dota match.

"It feels a little bit like a human, but at the same time, it’s something else," Dendi said after the game.

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