OpenAI’s bot is the first ever to defeat world’s best players in DotA 2 at The International 2017. It is a major step for AI in eSports. The bot was trained through self-play, but some tactics were hardcoded.
The bot doesn’t play DotA in regular 5v5 setup. It can only beat humans in 1v1 play. Team work will be harder to learn. Also, the bot plays only one character and has a few unfair advantages comparing to human players, e.g. it’s likely to have access to exact information such as distance to other players on the map and health.
A nice description of the difficulty of the problem and comparison with the game of Go from Denny Britz.
Stephen Merity posted a few comments on Twitter.