I understand what you're describing and I belive that this will be possible in the distant future. I just haven't seen any evidence of this being even close to

I understand what you're describing and I belive that this will be possible in the distant future. I just haven't seen any evidence of this being even close to possible with todays technology. I think the primary problem is the search space size. I've seen this type of learning work on simple 8 bit games, and it seems we may finally be at the stage to handle Go. However Dota has many orders of magnitude more different possible moves at any given situation. The total search space grows incredibly fast after every move. Thus, I do think neural nets can eventually learn how to play well, it's just that there's simply not enough memory or processing power to achieve any success right now.