A team of artificial intelligence-powered bots have beaten a group of Dota 2 former professional gamers in a new demonstration of the technology’s power.
The bots won a five-on-five best of three series 2-1 against a team of former pro players and one Dota 2 commentator.
The bots have trained themselves through the repeated playing of the game – 180 years worth of games a day according to the developers.
Dota 2 is an online fantasy battle arena game where teams fight to eliminate one another, it is also one of the richest gaming platforms in the world of eSports, with a prize pot across its tournaments in 2017 of just under 40 million dollars.
Known as the OpenAI Five, the bots learn game strategies and then apply them to gameplay themselves.
There are some parameters set on the games compared with normal Dota 2 play – fewer characters are available to switch between, for example – but the software’s ability to beat human opposition is impressive nonetheless.
Following their victory over the former pros as well as an in-house team, the next target is to beat a team of current pros at Dota 2 showpiece event, The International, later this month.
The research group has an overall aim of building AI products which could benefit humanity as a whole. It was co-founded by Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk.
This is not the first AI firm to score a gaming victory over humans – in 2016 Google-owned DeepMind’s AlphaGo software beat the world’s best player of the board game Go in a special exhibition match.