How To Play Ability Draft With Bots

Project Timeline

November 9, 2016

First commit of OpenAI's Dota 2 project.

March 9, 2017

First commit in Rapid repository.

August 11, 2017

September 7, 2017

First game won by a Dota 2 professional through normal gameplay against the final 1v1 Shadow Fiend bot after being attempted by dozens of pros over thousands of games.

February 28, 2018

First 5v5 results: RL agent beats OpenAI scripted bot at tower minigame.

First team to destroy a tower wins.

April 3, 2018

RL agent beats in-house OpenAI team at net worth minigame.

Team with the higher net worth after 7 minutes wins.

June 6, 2018

RL agent defeats in-house OpenAI team at fairly restricted 5v5.

Mirror match of 5 fixed heroes utilizing 5 invulnerable couriers. No neutrals, runes, shrines, wards, invisibility, summons, illusions, or Scan. No Divine Rapier, Bottle, Quelling Blade, Boots of Travel, Tome of Knowledge, or Infused Raindrop.

Read "OpenAI Five"
Watch video

#AI bots just beat humans at the video game Dota 2. That's a big deal, because their victory required teamwork and collaboration – a huge milestone in advancing artificial intelligence.

June 30, 2018

OpenAI Five's parameters initialized.

August 5, 2018

OpenAI Five defeats popular casters at the Benchmark in front of a live audience and 100k livestream viewers, with somewhat restricted 5v5.

August 9, 2018

Match vs. Team Secret (1–2): OpenAI Five loses its first match to professional players.

August 17, 2018

First significant surgery: OpenAI Five is migrated to Dota 7.19 after training for 7 weeks on Dota 7.16.

August 22–24, 2018

August 26, 2018

More model capacity: OpenAI Five's long short-term memory (LSTM) size is doubled and number of parameters quadrupled.

October 5, 2018

December 10, 2018

January 16, 2019

February 1, 2019

April 5, 2019

Final surgery to upgrade to the 7.21d patch, which would not have been possible from scratch.

April 13, 2019

OpenAI Five wins back-to-back games versus Dota 2 world champions OG at Finals, becoming the first AI to beat the world champions in an esports game.

Drafted from a 17 hero pool. No summons or illusions.

Read "OpenAI Five Finals"
Read "OpenAI Five Defeats Dota 2 World Champions"
Rewatch live event

Sébastien "Ceb" Debs

Member of OG

You play against [OpenAI Five] and you realize it has a playstyle that is different. It's doing things that you've never done and you've never seen. Sometimes it looks extremely silly. But then again, are you going to be human and be like "Hey, this looks very stupid, this is bad" or [do] you try to take it to next steps, like "Why is it doing this?"

One key learning that we took is how it was allocating resources. It's just allocating resources as efficiently as possible. And then you realize that we're guilty of being stuck in a team dynamic, whereas sometimes we have to be way more flexible. […] If OpenAI does that dynamic switch at 100%, we maybe went from 5% to 10%? But that is already a difference—we've noticed it.

April 18–21, 2019

OpenAI Five is scaled up to play the Internet as competitor or teammate in OpenAI Arena.

OpenAI Five win rate

99.4%

7215 wins, 42 losses

Total players

33.7K

15K competitve, 18.7K cooperative

View all results

July 12, 2019

Finished training of a new agent, Rerun, which reached a 98+% win rate against the agent that played at Finals. This was completed in 2 months, without surgery, and while utilizing only 20% of the resources.

August 25, 2019

Johan "N0tail" Sundstein

Captain of OG

I don't believe in comparing OpenAI Five to human performance, since it's like comparing the strength we have to hydraulics. Instead of looking at how inhuman and absurd its reaction time is, or how it will never get tired or make the mistakes you'll make as a human, we looked at the patterns it showed moving around the map and allocating resources.

In terms of what OpenAI has done for us and how it influenced our run at TI9, one of the many curious patterns was the buyback and pressure play that happened in most of the games. We had a lot of talks about fighting and pressuring and how it used a different approach from any human in the past. As people, it's about being realistic and learning from the brain of the AI and not the hydraulic strength that machines have.