12 August, 2017
What's particularly impressive about the feat is that winning in Dota tasks players with building intuition about what their opponents will do, and building a corresponding game plan.
The bot made its worldwide debut at The global, the largest esports tournament in the world with a prize pool of $24 million.
It was a 1 vs 1 Dota 2 match in a controlled environment but the AI's success is still remarkable.
As part of a special demonstration for the crown, the OpenAI bot defeated Dendi easily in the first of three rounds, with the victor being the first to two kills or destroying an in-game tower.
Open AI said the 1v1 bot has learned from playing against itself in lifetimes worth of matches.
Artificial intelligence company Open AI has created a bot that is taking down top Dota 2 players at The International 2017. At the same time, he has already played in Dota 2 a greater number of parties than any other professional athlete. "We didn't program it to understand the rules of Dota", says Greg from OpenAI, the team of researchers and engineers that developed the bot.
This is not the first time that artificial intelligence has surpassed humans in the gaming arena; earlier this year, Google's AlphaGo defeated the world's top Go player. Although AI's action-per-minute was found to be in comparison to the average human player skill level, it was able to slowly able to learn from the mistakes and develop intuitive skills to beat even the best in the game. Afterwards, Dendi admitted he was surprised at how easily the bot beat a human player, adding that it felt "a little like human, but a little like something else".
