Tencent details how its MOBA-playing AI system beats 99.81% of human opponents

In August, Tencent announced it had developed an AI system capable of defeating teams of pros in a five-on-five match in Honor of Kings (or Arena of Valor, depending on the region). This was a noteworthy achievement — Honor of Kings occupies the video game subgenre known as multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs), which are incomplete information games in the sense that players are unaware of the actions other players choose. The endgame, then, isn’t merely AI that achieves Honor of Kings superhero performance, but insights that might be used to develop systems capable of solving some of society’s toughest challenges.

A paper published this week peels back the layers of Tencent’s technique, which the coauthors describe as “highly scalable.” They claim its novel strategies enable it to explore the game map “efficiently,” with an actor-critic architecture that self-improves over time.