Evolving a Dota 2 bot: Illuminating search in CGP and NEAT
Authors: Paul Templier, Lucas Hervier, Dennis G. Wilson
Published in Competition at GECCO 2020, 2020
In this work we present an evolution-based approach applied to Dota 2 in the Project Breezy challenge. The goal of this project is to train an agent to play a 1v1 Midlane match against the game's bots of varrying difficulties, with both sides playing Shadow Fiend. The approach we implemented relies on the MAP-elites algorithm assisted with a neural-based simulator of the game to increase behavior diversity and reduce computation load, using CGP agents or NEAT networks as individuals.