Meet the Bot: OpenAI and Dota 2

OpenAI has created a Dota 2 bot that plays at the level of human professionals. Humans can look forward to coexistence with increasingly clever AIs in both virtual and real world settings. See also Robots taking our jobs.

OpenAI: Dota 1v1 is a complex game with hidden information. Agents must learn to plan, attack, trick, and deceive their opponents. The correlation between player skill and actions-per-minute is not strong, and in fact, our AI’s actions-per-minute are comparable to that of an average human player.

Success in Dota requires players to develop intuitions about their opponents and plan accordingly. In the above video you can see that our bot has learned — entirely via self-play — to predict where other players will move, to improvise in response to unfamiliar situations, and how to influence the other player’s allied units to help it succeed.

About the game ("Defense of the Ancient").

Wikipedia: Dota 2 is played in matches between two teams of five players, with each team occupying and defending their own separate base on the map. Each of the ten players independently controls a powerful character, known as a "hero", who all have unique abilities and styles of play. During a match, a player and their team collects experience points and items for their heroes in order to fight through the opposing team's heroes and other defenses. A team wins by being the first to destroy a large structure located in the opposing team's base, called the "Ancient".

Related: this is a nice recent interview with Demis Hassabis of Deep Mind. He talks a bit about Go innovation resulting from AlphaGo.