AI Team Will Take On Pros at the International 2018
By Zac Cameron ·
We've already seen AI take on players in a 1v1 format, now we'll see whether a full team can handle some of the best players in the world.
Last year at The International 2017 we saw something remarkable, as an AI managed to take on several pro players in a very competitive 1v1 format. OpenAI, the research company sponsored by big names such as Microsoft and Elon Musk, has already demonstrated the learning capabilities of their technology, with the AI going toe-to-toe with pro players Danil "Dendi" Ishutin, Syed "Sumail" Hassan, and Artour "Arteezy" Babaev in 1v1 mirror matches to showcase it’s mechanical skill and decision making capabilities.
As detailed in their recent update post, the OpenAI Five system has been hard at work preparing for the upcoming match: “OpenAI Five plays 180 years’ worth of games against itself every day, learning via self-play. It trains using a scaled-up version of Proximal Policy Optimization running on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores — a larger-scale version of the system we built to play the much-simpler solo variant of the game last year. Using a separate LSTM for each hero and no human data, it learns recognizable strategies. This indicates that reinforcement learning can yield long-term planning with large but achievable scale — without fundamental advances, contrary to our own expectations upon starting the project.”
With that kind of power behind it, the match ahead should be an exciting one to watch. There will be a benchmark game taking place much sooner than The International 2018 however, as the system takes on top players in a benchmark game in July. You can catch that match on the 28th of July on their Twitch channel, here. For more Dota 2 news, check out the unfortunate end to Thunder Predator’s bid for a spot at The International 2018, here.