Robots and AI are now becoming part and parcel of professional video games.

Artificial intelligence, AI, is conquering human beings on the world of Go boards and chess. The kind of eSports that are attracting most spectators are mostly video games involving professional gamers competing in war and strategy games. Such games present many types of problems that computers have to deal with. These games are often complex and involve a lot of teamwork. Players usually fail to know the position of their opponents when playing this kind of games. Hence, these games are like a real-world experience that has presented a huge milestone for intelligent machines to conquer.

Just recently, OpenAI, a research group based in San Francisco and backed by renowned personalities like Elon Musk, the Tesla founder, described major breakthroughs in AI that will take on the best professional esports players in the world. Although there are many challenges that OpenAI will have to overcome, they believe that they are ready to take on the Dota 2 Super Bowl championship that will take place in Vancouver this August. If OpenAI can manage to challenge the eSports Super Bowl championships, then they will definitely steal the show from DeepMind. DeepMind is an AI branch of Alphabet. Alphabet is at the forefront of challenging the StarCraft video game after conquering the best Go players in the world. According to OpenAI, complex video games are capturing the continuous and messy nature of the real world.

OpenAI has also reported that five of its numerous neural networks a human team of Dota 2 that ranked among the top teams of professional players. However, this was only possible after the video game was simplified by removing that gameplay options. Greg Brockman, an OpenAI co-founder agrees that the changes made to the game, including the ability of players to become invisible, did alter the game significantly. Brockman argues that the OpenAI bot can only learn to play full gameplay until the developers have done so. The team of Dota 2 won on full gameplay.

The OpenAI research group has been around for some time now. They first reported winning against humans last year at a simpler version of Dota 2. The bot was largely criticized for changing major gameplay options to win. According to Brockman, OpenAI allows its newest algorithms to lose on new game mechanics with the aim of mastering them. He hopes that they will be able to work on the remaining tasks before August.

Despite all that, OpenAI plans to only play the game with limited options. For instance, there will be a limited set of characters or heroes, This will make the game simpler than the most complex human versions. The OpenAI bot works through machine learning by using trial and error techniques while playing against itself. This machine learning technique is known as reinforcement learning. Researchers at OpenAI said that challenging teams of five players demanded fewer changes to the AI algorithms than they had anticipated. To their surprise, most advances were as a result of increasing the computing power presented to the challenge.

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