There’s no doubt that the popularity of MMORPGs such asDota 2is steadily on the rise, especially with the game having been linked to events such as the Olympic Council of Asia’s announcement thateSports will be made an official medal sportat the upcoming 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China. Of course, the interest in eSports is multifaceted, for not only are the games themselves thoroughly engaging to play and have the potential to draw large audiences, but also they can serve as a means to further advance other technologies.
Speaking of tech getting better, an eliteDota 2team of three former pros, one current pro, and a play-by-play commentator recently took on five artificial intelligence bots in the game at an event in San Francisco, with the humans being beaten by the AI collective, 2-1. The artificial intelligence technology came from OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company co-founded by Elon Musk. Apparently, the five-on-five bot team has been in development all year, but this was the first true competition against real professionals.
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After OpenAI took down members of the audience with ease during a warmup round, the bot network started and finished the first of the two matches strongly, stopping its human opponents from destroying any of its defensive towers. The second match saw the pro team take out one of OpenAI’s towers, but the AI group won regardless. Even though the artificial intelligence bested the professionalDota 2players two-out-of-three, the humans managed to score a victory in the third match.
While OpenAI’s defeat of some ofDota 2’s cream of the crop players is decidedly impressive, what’s definitely more noteworthy is the unprecedentedadvancement of artificial intelligenceitself. After all, the victory of the non-profit AI research company’s bot collective over humans in a strategic MMORPG is just one of many instances of computational technology growing smarter by the day.
Dota 2is available now for PC, Mac, and Linux.
