An AI Bot Just Beat Another Pro Game Player. Here’s Why That’s A Big Deal.

OpenAI’s win was immediately hailed by Elon Musk as an achievement bigger than Google DeepMind’s win in the ancient game of Go.

By Artur Kiulian edited by Dan Bova Aug 15, 2017
OpenAI | YouTube

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Artificial intelligence in the form of an intelligent game agent developed by Elon Musk-backed OpenAI has just defeated one of the world’s top esports players. Danil “Dendi” Ishutin, a famous player of the game Dota, just lost two games in a row and refused to play the third after the bot showed its amazing game play skills.

It’s definitely not the first time AI beat a human at a game, with AI recently besting professional poker players and the world’s top Go player, Lee Sedol. But, this time it’s different, since the competition was held within a much more complicated game environment.

Related: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Are Arguing About AI — But They’re Both Missing the Point

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The culmination of their research took place on a mainstage of the International Dota 2 Championships, one of the biggest esporting events in the world. As the team of researchers mentioned, it only took an hour of training for the bot to learn the necessary skills to dominate built-in game bots. And it took two weeks of learning in real-time to beat the top human player.

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Ishutin also mentioned how the bot didn’t hesitate when making certain key decisions, which most of the human players usually do — which again proves how much volatility emotions have on human decision-making process.

“His movement is insane, I’m really nervous. … OK. I give up, he is too strong,” Ishutin said during the gameplay.

Related: Will Artificial Intelligence Be Illegal in Europe Next Year?

AI wins over Go game champions

In contrast to chess, esports gameplay for games such as Dota usually contains a lot of hidden information. That’s why intelligent game agents must learn to adapt, create a strategy of attacks and tricks, and even learn the ability to deceive their opponents.

As OpenAI states, the correlation between its bot’s actions-per-minute is comparable to that of an average human player, which means it’s not the ability to execute fast that matters for the gameplay, it’s the skill.

Related: The Future of Productivity: AI and Machine Learning

That is why OpenAI’s win was immediately hailed by Elon Musk, one of the main supporters of the initiative, as an achievement bigger than Google DeepMind’s win in the ancient game of Go.

There is more and more interest coming from big companies to experiment with artificial intelligence within the gaming environments. DeepMind recently announced a partnership with Blizzard, the creator of the wildly popular Starcraft game. They’ve introduced a new way to train bots for Starcraft and released a joint research paper with the outline of the game environment for the reinforcement learning applications.

Artificial intelligence in the form of an intelligent game agent developed by Elon Musk-backed OpenAI has just defeated one of the world’s top esports players. Danil “Dendi” Ishutin, a famous player of the game Dota, just lost two games in a row and refused to play the third after the bot showed its amazing game play skills.

It’s definitely not the first time AI beat a human at a game, with AI recently besting professional poker players and the world’s top Go player, Lee Sedol. But, this time it’s different, since the competition was held within a much more complicated game environment.

Related: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Are Arguing About AI — But They’re Both Missing the Point

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Artur Kiulian

Partner at Colab at Colab
Artur Kiulian, M.S.A.I., is a partner at Colab, a Los Angeles-based venture studio that helps startups build technology products using the benefits of machine learning. An expert in artificial intelligence, Kiulian is the author of Robot is the Boss: How to do business with artificial intelligence.

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