OpenAI Bot Beats Dendi at TI7
Valve's "Dota 2" has received a lot of attention since it was first released. It has created its own community, and in order to give fans a chance to gather and have fun, Valve organized The International 2017 (TI7), which is known as the annual "Dota" championships. During TI7, the Elon Musk-backed OpenAI bot made an appearance and played against one of the world's best players, Danil "Dendi" Ishutin, and he was beaten quite badly.
"What we've built here is a general learning system, which is still limited in a number of ways, but it's still capable enough to beat the best human pros at Dota," OpenAI's chief technological officer Greg Brockman said in a streamed interview. "This is a step toward building more general systems which can learn more complicated, messy, and important real-world tasks like being a surgeon."
Ishutin and the bot treated everyone at TI7 to a one-on-one match in the popular multiplayer online battle arena. In the first game of "Dota 2," the OpenAI bot definitely had the upper hand, and it did not need to have the commentator say as everyone could see that Ishutin was struggling. After the bot scored first blood, the pair traded blows before Ishutin finally surrendered in the middle of the second game.
Further reports reveal that Ishutin took to social media to express his thoughts on the experience, and he said that the OpenAI bot was a tough one to beat and it certainly would not be possible to win against it in the first try. He praised the intelligence of the people behind the technology and expressed his excitement for the future.
The OpenAI bot trained entirely through self-play as it was constantly matched with players of the same level. It climbed up the ranks until it finally became as smart and capable as the professional players of Valve's "Dota 2."
