Dota 2's Top Players Beaten by Elon Musk-Backed OpenAI Startup

A bot created by the Elon Musk-backed nonprofit startup 'OpenAI' has defeated champion Danylo 'Dendi' Ishut in multiplayer online battle arena Defense of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2) in two back-to-back demonstration matches. Several practice matches were played with other top players over the weekend, including Syed 'Suma1l' Hassan and Artour 'Arteezy' Babaev.

The game, played at the annual tournament The International on Saturday in Keyarena at Seattle Center, has a winning prize of over $20 million, Fortune reported.

Dota 2 is a complex, team-based game played by over 10 million people monthly. The game is continuous, has hidden information and good strategy and positioning win over raw mechanics.

OpenAI uses Dota 2 as a test-bed for new AI technologies.

Musk hailed the achievement on Twitter, saying: "It was a significant advance over what AI had accomplished in more traditional games."

"OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go," Elon Musk tweeted.

OpenAI describes it as "a step towards building AI systems which accomplish well-defined goals in messy, complicated situations involving real humans".

From the last year, AI developers have shown that computers can dominate the best human players like in Go and chess.

"But Dota 2 has far more variables and possible board states than even Go, meaning decision-making is much more complex. The game also takes place in real time rather than discrete turns," the report said.

Last year, Google-run artificial intelligence (AI) programme AlphaGo defeated legendary player Lee Se-dol in Go - a complex Chinese board game that is considered the "quintessential unsolved problem" for machine intelligence.

The win came in the first tie of the five-match series being held in Seoul, South Korea. The tournament, "Google Deepmind Challenge match".

Written with inputs from IANS