‘It knew what you were going to do next’: AI learns from pro gamers then crushes them – Washington Post

For decades, the worlds smartest game-playing humans have been racking up losses to increasingly sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence.

The defeats began in the 1990s when IBMs Deep Blue computer conquered chess master Garry Kasparov. More recently,Ke Jie until then the worlds best player of the ancient Chinese board game Go was defeated by a Google computer programin May.

Now the AIsupergamers havemoved intothe world of e-sports. Last week, an artificial intelligence bot created by the Elon Musk-backed start-up OpenAI defeated some of the worlds most talented players of Dota 2, a fast-paced, highly complex, multiplayer online video game that draws fierce competition from all over the globe.

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OpenAI unveiled itsbot at an annual Dota 2 tournament where players walk away with millions in prize money.It was a pivotal moment in gaming and in AI research largely because of how the bot developed its skills and how long it took to refine them enough to defeat the worlds most talented pros, according to Greg Brockman, co-founder and chief technology officer of OpenAI.

The somewhat frightening reality: It only took the bot two weeks to go from laughable novice to world-class competitor, a period in which Brockman said the bot gathered lifetimes of experience by playing itself.

During that period, players said, the botwent from behaving like a bot to behaving in a way that felt more alive.

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Danylo Dendi Ishutin, one of the games top players, was defeated twice by his AI competition, whichfelt a little like human, but a little like something else, he said, according to the Verge.

Brockman agreed with that perspective:You kind of see that this thing is super fast and no human can execute its moves as well, but it was also strategic, and it kind of knows what youre going to do, he said. When you go off screen, for example, it would predict what you were going to do next. Thats not something we expected.

Brockman said games are a great testing ground for AI because they offer a defined set of rules with baked-in complexity that allow developers to measure a bots changing skill level.He said one of the major revelations of the Dota 2 bots success was that it was achieved via self-play a form of training in which the bot would continuously play against a copy of itself until it amassed more and more knowledge while improving incrementally.

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For a game as complicated as Dota 2 which incorporates more than 100 playable roles and thousands of moves self play proved more organic and comprehensive than having a human program the bots behavior.

If youre a novice playing against someone who is awesome playing tennis against Serena Williams, for example youre going to be crushed, and you wont realize there are slightly better techniques or ways of doing something, Brockman said. The magic happens when your opponent is exactly balanced with you so that if you explore and find a slightly better strategy it is then reflected in your performance in the game.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk hailed the bots achievement in historic fashion on Twitter before going on to once again express his concerns about artificial intelligence, which he said poses vastly more risk than North Korea.

Musk unleashed a debateon the dangers of AI last month when he tweeted that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerbergs understanding of the threat posed by AI is limited.