Artificial intelligence has begun its quest to revolutionize eSports. How does AI impact eSports? In recent years, both Elon Musk and Google have created ‘unbeatable’ AI bots that have beaten their human foes in classic eSports such as Dota 2 and StarCraft 2.
This is just the beginning. AI and esports are becoming more and more interconnected as humans learn from machines and vice versa. With artificial intelligence being used to do everything from eliminating match-fixing to improving gameplay, it seems there may be a future for AI and esports.
For many, though, part of the appeal of eSports is the human stories, the emotion, the storytelling and the unpredictability of sports. AI can erode some of that.
Driving the human experience
The concept of artificial intelligence has been around since the origins of science fiction. As early as the early 19th century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein showed us a work of fiction about an artificially created being that was capable of independent thought.
Games are one of the key ways in which AI can display creativity while operating within fixed rules. Deep Blue’s famous victory over chess champion Garry Kasparov was just the beginning of a long string of triumphs in other games such as Go, poker, and a variety of video games like Pong.
As such, it is no surprise that AI is gradually making its presence felt in esports. AI has been used to do everything from providing more durable opponents for training to improving match predictions and analysis.
There are now specialist esports sites like Betting that use software to generate odds on whether a particular esports team can beat its opponents.
But AI would go much further than this to build a digital construct of each player’s past performance to design a much more rigorous prediction for the future.
Additionally, AI software could detect any anomalies in gameplay that could suggest negative behaviour, such as cheating or match-fixing.
How AI is impacting eSports: Building the ultimate AI opponent
Artificial intelligence is already being used as a training tool by several professional esports organizations. By using AI platforms like SenpAI, players are benefiting from AI algorithms to improve their gameplay in everything from League of Legends to Valorant.
Many of these improvements are based on specialized use of game data that identifies weaknesses that need to be overcome.
However, it is the advent of the AI opponent that promises to take things to the next level. Playing against a computer opponent has been a staple of most video games. But artificial intelligence promises to provide us with much more creative computer opponents.
An AI opponent would be constantly learning behaviours from its human competitors. This means that AI opponents could improve with each game they play, potentially giving us virtually unbeatable competitors.
Interesting, right? You already know how artificial intelligence impacts eSports and the whole spectrum of possibilities it generates. This does not stop and continues to develop, opening up new job opportunities and also improving the experience of people who play electronic sports. Are you interested in training?
MIOTI, Tech & Business School is a technological business school in Madrid that implements a learning-by-doing learning methodology, in which students learn knowledge and skills from a very practical perspective, through real cases and solving business problems.
In this sense, MIOTI enhances the creativity of professionals so that their students dare to make their own creations using MIOTI equipment and tools, encouraging group work and shared knowledge.
The objective is to train better-qualified people to face the challenging world of Data Science and the Internet of Things, where currently 90% of the students trained at this centre have a job related to their training.