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The Dawn of Pro AI Gamers?

October 21, 2018 Ian LeViness Entertainment Comments Off

If it feels like getting paid for gaming has just started to be a thing, that’s because it has.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the first professional gamer was Dennis “Thresh” Fong, who won a Ferrari in an e-sports tournament in 1997. The e-sports industry as we know it today, with stars like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, did not really start to take off until 2010, though it seems to have officially begun in Korea, around the year 2000. Nowadays, it seems to be a normal occurrence that e-sports gamers go from obscurity to almost instant stardom because of a few major tournament wins, which also bring them to millionaire status.

As of August 22, Wired Magazine made something public about the e-sports space that most of you may not be aware of.

Humans are not the only ones playing in cash tournaments.

Five AI players joined a DOTA 2 tournament in the attempt to prove that AIs can perform just as well as human players. In the end, they got close, but not close enough as a Brazilian team called paiN held them off. In truth, the AIs were reportedly not an actual part of the tournament, but, according to Wired, more of a side show. Furthermore, it also appears that the AI gamer was not operating on unsupervised learning principles but rather, supervised learning principles. To recap, this indicates that there was probably significant human intervention in the AI’s efforts to face off against these human gamers.

The goal of this challenge involving human players versus AIs, which actually preceded the actual tournament, was seemingly to help human players train against what are considered to be the best available AI algorithms. In other words, the AI company behind these systems was hoping to get these players ready for what they believe will be an AI driven industry in the future. Because these particular AI systems were developed by the Elon Musk-supported company called Open AI, in future posts, we will delve further into Open AI’s complete vision including how this event specifically pertains to it.

For now, due to the fact that the AIs faced off against humans, but learned from their actions at the same time, it’s unclear whether their primary function will be collaborative or competitive.