19 ms·

Hype or Not? Some Perspective on OpenAI’s DotA 2 Bot

170 points by dennybritz 9y ago

colordrops 9y ago
Big assumptions were made by the author of this post, the biggest being that they used an API to get access to game data rather than pixels. If the AI were limited to pixels then the achievement is much greater.
- outdraft 9y ago
  Fairly certain they're using the api valve released earlier. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_Bot_Scripting https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_Bot_Scripting
- dvt 9y ago
  Not really, as the model was still overfit for highly-technical Shadowfiend 1v1 mid play. With that said, it most likely used the API.
- dennybritz 9y ago
  Author here. I agree this is an assumption, but based on my experience it is very unlikely that this is trained on pixels. Training would've been orders of magnitude more expensive. If it really is trained on pixel input I would be shocked and extremely impressed, and parts of post would not apply.
- taneq 9y ago
  Didn't they say (or at least strongly imply) that it uses the standard DOTA bot interface?
- snowmaker 9y ago
  Maybe the OpenAI team can clarify this point? I agree it is key factor.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
We did not make sudden progress in AI because our algorithms are so smart – it worked because our researchers are smart about setting up the problem in just the right way to work around the limitations of current techniques. This statement is like putting wheels and a motor at the base of the goalposts. Everyone who practices ML knows the reality that while we're not going to see AGI for a while, and these systems are massively hard to build and do very narrow bounded things, they are also making massive progress in "intelligent" outputs at a pace we've never seen. Yes, there is hype, but there are pretty solid reasons to be hyped. We'll keep seeing people saying oh well it's not that impressive probably until AGI has clearly taken everyone's job in 2100 and we're all just providing training data for it.
- dennybritz 9y ago
  I agree. The point I was trying to make is not whether it is impressive or not (it is impressive!), but that the general press hype about "AI breakthroughs that will soon kill us all and need regulation" is over the top and misleading. The probably massive engineering effort that went into this is, to me, more impressive than the algorithmic innovation, if any. Progress is made with small incremental improvements, including this one, and there have been few real algorithmic "breakthroughts" over the past few years. That's why I think it is important to give some perspective to the hype.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    I somewhat agree with that but I think the biggest (underappreciated) algorithmic improvement recently was MaskRCNN. The ability to do Segmentation and Detection in the same net is huge.
    - visarga 9y ago
      But isn't that slow? It doesn't parallelize well for real time processing, because it goes sequentially pixel by pixel while CNNs process all pixels in parallel.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
dvt 9y ago
Pretty much agree with everything in here. As I said in my earlier posting (and this blog post reiterates), a 1v1 Shadowfiend mid is highly technical and does not require a huge search space (like in Go or Chess) or any judgment; all it takes is a few tactics (e.g. creep blocking) and good aim for the razes. Also, the bot was already beaten 50+ times[1]. There are at least 3 strategies that work. It just goes to show how primitive AI is, as it took the AI team thousands of generations to get it to this stage, but a few determined gamers outsmarted it (using a few cheap meta-strategies) it in less than 6 hours after release. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_were_defeated_atleast_50_times/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_w...
- teej 9y ago
  What hero do you think would be a better test?
  - HappyTypist 9y ago
    Techies.
  - justicezyx 9y ago
    It's not about which hero 1v1 is not a competitive part of dota, if you claim beat pro players it has to be 5v5 with banpick Otherwise just say it's 1v1 mid...
    - thomasahle 9y ago
      Sure, but it hadn't been done before. They say they'll go for 5v5 next year, and if it wins I'm sure we'll move the goal posts further again.
      - cthor 9y ago
        I'll precommit to being very impressed if a bot can achieve >5k MMR in solo ranked or if a bot-controlled team wins a tier 6 (or higher) battle cup. When Checkers and Chess and Go pros were beaten by AI at the actual game, people were impressed, because it was impressive. (The goalpost moving involved claiming each consecutive game could not be solved.) I don't think anyone here is saying Dota 2 won't be solved eventually or that its complexity is beyond the realm of AI (as was claimed of Chess/Go in the past). They're just saying this particular achievement isn't actually meaningful progress. It's using known techniques to do something those techniques are known to do.
Funnnny 9y ago
It worths noting that, shortly after they offer SF arcana (extremely rare item), 50 people did go and beat the bot on the spot.
- derimagia 9y ago
  Well, almost all of them did the same strategy - I'm curious once the first few "strategies" how many people will be able to beat it.
- yskchu 9y ago
  The strategy that was used, seems to be surprise the AI and mess up it's decision tree: The general strategy is to win by claiming first tower. At 0:00, you aggro the enemy creep wave so that they start following you. Then you walk around in a circle around the jungle, and the enemy wave will start to form a congo line that will follow you around. You then path around the jungle so that on the next wave spawn, you can aggro the wave again and continue to walk around in circles. The AI will burn glyph when your creep wave hits the tower, and for some reason it can't really decide between chasing you or defending the tower. So after about 5 minutes of doing this, your creep waves will eventually destroy the tower and you win the 1v1. From https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_were_defeated_atleast_50_times/dliundl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_w...
  - KVFinn 9y ago
    Someone else said they did by using their own courier to bait the bot too deep. Sounded like a harder way to win than this though.
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    This is, admittedly, a weird enough strategy that a human player would probably get flustered and respond with suboptimal choices, just like the AI did. A human would probably adapt to the situation more quickly, though. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a few people are trying this strategy in pub games now, just for shits and giggles. :)
darod 9y ago
While the author is probably right and this is no huge breakthrough in AI/ML, it is yet another example of AI/ML being able to do an activity that surpasses a human's ability. I am still waiting for an example of how AI/ML will complement a human's life as opposed to demonstrating an area where a human can be replaced.
- JSONwebtoken 9y ago
  How can you not see applications where replacing humans complements another human's life? I'm sure if you thought about it, you could see how self driving cars, real time translation, image to text for visually impaired, could be of some benefit to peoples lives? These applications might be automating a human out of a job, but they are also far superior at their narrow task. You can argue the total societal value net the societal cost of putting some people out of jobs, but saying you can't think of any application where AI can complement peoples lives is being intentionally hyperbolic and is a bad start to a discussion.
  - darod 9y ago
    In this application who does this AI serve? A self driving car doesn't help me to become a better driver. It removes me from the driving equation all together.
candiodari 9y ago
> Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that's a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too. I hate that people actually see things this way. Regulation to prevent AIs from taking over the world will never happen, because nation states won't cooperate on such rules [1]. Additionally you can't catch people using AIs to determine their actions. BUT what regulation can do is prevent people from competing with a few of Larry Page's and Elon Musk's businesses. [1] https://www.rt.com/news/395375-kalashnikov-automated-neural-network-gun/ https://www.rt.com/news/395375-kalashnikov-automated-neural-...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 9y ago
  There are other dangers besides "taking over the world". In fact, Elon Musk should know, since his company's AI already got people killed.
- sweden 9y ago
  The "taking of the world" scenario is a too narrow view of the whole complexity of AI regulation. There are other more realistic and important scenarios that need to be addressed, for example: AI's default behaviour when challenged with a possibility of a car accident on a self driving system. Should the car try to avoid the accident by jumping of a cliff, sacrificing the life of the driver and of the people inside the car, or should it hit the next car making the accident worse for the other person but potentially saving the life of the people inside the car?
  - mizzao 9y ago
    You must be thinking of http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ But in practice, this is more a study of people's ethical tendencies around the world than a practical way to address AI decision-making in bad situations.
zaroth 9y ago
Where do bots go to fight other bots in millions of games, and algorithms compete for superiority? I assume there must be an ongoing "marketplace" to match bots and run the simulations.
- astrojams 9y ago
  They play themselves. No need to play other bots.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    Is that a fact? You don't ever see better performance by training in a heterogeneous environment? Or just, no one does it this way?
nbkvjones 9y ago
there was a "discussion" on nadota.com about the bot and the semipro player that openai used to test chimed in. apparently the set of items the bot chose to purchase from was limited[1] and recommended by the semipro tester. As someone who knows next to nothing about ai, my question is this: the bot was announced on stage as blank slate, dumped into dota, and built entirely from grinding countless games against itself; is it reasonable to pitch it this way while having this item constraint from an outside source? I also wonder what else was recommended by the tester, and then constrained. the "discussion" is linked below and the tester is the user sammyboy. Here's a warning though: nadota is 99% trolling, hate, idiocy, and garbage. [1] http://nadota.com/showthread.php?41718-terrifying-1v1-mid-AI-dumpsters-suma1l-arteezy-with-ease&p=1807415&viewfull=1#post1807415 http://nadota.com/showthread.php?41718-terrifying-1v1-mid-AI...
- dennybritz 9y ago
  The other big "hardcoded" constraint is most likely the usage of the bot API. The API itself is complex with lots of functionality and I would assume that researchers were extremely smart about picking out just the right API calls that are needed to make it work. That's very different from and much easier than training an agent based on raw keyboard/mouse input.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gdb 9y ago
  (I work at OpenAI.) We'll have another blog post coming in the next few days. But as a sneak peek: we use self-play to learn everything that depends on an interaction with the opponent. Didn't need to with those that don't (e.g. fixed item builds, separately learned creep block).
  - RSchaeffer 9y ago
    Can you give us a sneak peak of OpenAI's approach to 5v5 Dota? :D
  - hayd 9y ago
jarsin 9y ago
All the bots have to do is spew tons of toxic crap in chat. Then they will be like any other real life DOTA player.
- perishabledave 9y ago
  I think the root of that is the high reliance on teammates and the level of commitment each game takes. Unlike League there is no early surrender, so if you’re in a rough game you have to endure the full duration which can last around an hour. If you feel like it’s your teammate, who is probably randomly paired with you, that is failing it’s easy to get frustrated. This is one of the many things that make Dota either extremely frustrating or extremely satisfying.
aorth 9y ago
I'm still just trying to figure out what "Dota" stands for. Is it an acronym? Neither the Valve website or Wikipedia clarify this!
- spaceseaman 9y ago
  DefenseOfTheAncients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- idle_processor 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients
- detaro 9y ago
  The original Warcraft mod was called Defense of the Ancients, the Valve title Dota 2 as far as I know always has been just Dota
- natural219 9y ago
  Funny story. The original term "DOTA" was an acronym, for "Defense of the Ancients", which was the original Warcraft 3 mod of which the later game, "Dota 2", was based. Since the original DOTA was a community mod using assets from a commercial (IE, trademarked) Blizzard property, it was in sort of a gray area in regards to re-commercialization of what was essentially the same gameplay and characters. To avoid further standing for Blizzard to reclaim its trademarked properties, Valve registered the trademark "Dota" specifically as a word that doesn't refer to anything, officially eliminating the acronym from the name and somehow distancing the new engine from trouble with the trademark.
JonathanLIabc 9y ago
I see Elon Musk tweets as a warning about the potential of AI, not a hype of AI nor the current stage of AI. The most impressive part to me is that the bots are self-learned. On the other hand, AlphaGo is supervisored. They are different (not to say which one is better).
DSrcl 9y ago
A lot of dota's mechanics is designed with the assumption that the player is human -- e.g. skills that can be programmed to be released perfectly but are hard for a human (even pro) to do so reliably (Shadow Fiend's raze is one of them).
oldstrangers 9y ago
Surely the author knows that neither Chess nor Go have been "solved". Qoutes or no qoutes, it's still very inaccurate. I'd also argue that chess and go are both vastly more difficult problem sets. We literally do not have the computational power to solve a game of chess and it's projected that we won't for another 50-100 years.
craigsmansion 9y ago
I hope someone can clarify. What are the definitions of AI and game complexity in this field? These all sound like very exiting developments. As I read about them a lot of times games such as Dota and Starcraft are touted as more complex than Chess or Go, but--at least with Starcraft, the AIs are limited in their number of actions to level the playing field. Isn't that like claiming humans can run faster than greyhounds, provided that the greyhounds only get to use two legs? Or maybe claiming that humans are better at chess when computers are restricted to the maximum human ply depth? I also noticed a claim--again, in a Starcraft related article--that the AIs previously couldn't beat the build-in AIs (the computer players). What type of AIs are considered as challengers here? Only blank-slate self learning AIs?
- lyndonjohnsonbe 9y ago
  I know a little about AI in the first starcraft. Writing the AI to use the same interface as humans is difficult. To lower the bar for more people to play around with it, the AI reads data from memory directly. This creates an imbalance that they try to balance out with extra rules like rate limiting.
- Tangokat 9y ago
  The reason why the AI is limited in number of actions is because the strategy is interesting, not so much the mechanical skill (think aimbots in FPS games). We know the AI will be better at clicking and moving units and would be capable of moving every unit optimally at all times. But is it also capable of coming up with creative strategies that humans could use as well? I think both situations would be interesting to be honest. Have an unrestricted AI and a restricted AI - using ML they would probably develop vastly different ways of playing.
dukovni 9y ago
I would like to see an AI based search engine. So if I search on something it gives the CORRECT results back, not some SEO'd results and almost always useless. A search engine like this could make Google search looks like outdated tech.
musashizak 9y ago
There is top hype in ai but also in neuroscience. Actually there aren't scientific evidences that mind and coscience are materiale and born from the brain. Also the emotions are really important in the logic and thinking process. So without coscience and enotions we can't have real think on a machine.
itchyjunk 9y ago
Is no one upset that they claimed `learned from self play only` when clearly it isn't? Creep blocking ? really? it learned a left over feature in original DOTA from warcraft in a new stand alone DOTA 2 client strictly on self play? And that distinct animation canceling the bot does? Look at amateur players and pro players (pro players do it more often then actually needed to `warm up` the muscles, similar to extra key strokes in SC). I wouldn't be surprised if the bot was trained in tons of pro openings. :/ Why not be clear about what has been done? Deepmind has said they do supervised learning first and other stuff on top of that. My guess is something similar to that happened.
velobro 9y ago
The bot did not have their creep blocks hard coded. In the event the player purposefully messed up his block to see if the bot would respond and it did

170 points by dennybritz 9y ago

Big assumptions were made by the author of this post, the biggest being that they used an API to get access to game data rather than pixels. If the AI were limited to pixels then the achievement is much greater.

outdraft 9y ago
Fairly certain they're using the api valve released earlier. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_Bot_Scripting https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_Bot_Scripting
dvt 9y ago
Not really, as the model was still overfit for highly-technical Shadowfiend 1v1 mid play. With that said, it most likely used the API.
dennybritz 9y ago
Author here. I agree this is an assumption, but based on my experience it is very unlikely that this is trained on pixels. Training would've been orders of magnitude more expensive. If it really is trained on pixel input I would be shocked and extremely impressed, and parts of post would not apply.
taneq 9y ago
Didn't they say (or at least strongly imply) that it uses the standard DOTA bot interface?
snowmaker 9y ago
Maybe the OpenAI team can clarify this point? I agree it is key factor.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

We did not make sudden progress in AI because our algorithms are so smart – it worked because our researchers are smart about setting up the problem in just the right way to work around the limitations of current techniques. This statement is like putting wheels and a motor at the base of the goalposts. Everyone who practices ML knows the reality that while we're not going to see AGI for a while, and these systems are massively hard to build and do very narrow bounded things, they are also making massive progress in "intelligent" outputs at a pace we've never seen. Yes, there is hype, but there are pretty solid reasons to be hyped. We'll keep seeing people saying oh well it's not that impressive probably until AGI has clearly taken everyone's job in 2100 and we're all just providing training data for it.

dennybritz 9y ago
I agree. The point I was trying to make is not whether it is impressive or not (it is impressive!), but that the general press hype about "AI breakthroughs that will soon kill us all and need regulation" is over the top and misleading. The probably massive engineering effort that went into this is, to me, more impressive than the algorithmic innovation, if any. Progress is made with small incremental improvements, including this one, and there have been few real algorithmic "breakthroughts" over the past few years. That's why I think it is important to give some perspective to the hype.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  I somewhat agree with that but I think the biggest (underappreciated) algorithmic improvement recently was MaskRCNN. The ability to do Segmentation and Detection in the same net is huge.
  - visarga 9y ago
    But isn't that slow? It doesn't parallelize well for real time processing, because it goes sequentially pixel by pixel while CNNs process all pixels in parallel.
- gnaritas 9y ago

dvt 9y ago

Pretty much agree with everything in here. As I said in my earlier posting (and this blog post reiterates), a 1v1 Shadowfiend mid is highly technical and does not require a huge search space (like in Go or Chess) or any judgment; all it takes is a few tactics (e.g. creep blocking) and good aim for the razes. Also, the bot was already beaten 50+ times[1]. There are at least 3 strategies that work. It just goes to show how primitive AI is, as it took the AI team thousands of generations to get it to this stage, but a few determined gamers outsmarted it (using a few cheap meta-strategies) it in less than 6 hours after release. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_were_defeated_atleast_50_times/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_w...

teej 9y ago
What hero do you think would be a better test?
- HappyTypist 9y ago
  Techies.
- justicezyx 9y ago
  It's not about which hero 1v1 is not a competitive part of dota, if you claim beat pro players it has to be 5v5 with banpick Otherwise just say it's 1v1 mid...
  - thomasahle 9y ago
    Sure, but it hadn't been done before. They say they'll go for 5v5 next year, and if it wins I'm sure we'll move the goal posts further again.
    - cthor 9y ago
      I'll precommit to being very impressed if a bot can achieve >5k MMR in solo ranked or if a bot-controlled team wins a tier 6 (or higher) battle cup. When Checkers and Chess and Go pros were beaten by AI at the actual game, people were impressed, because it was impressive. (The goalpost moving involved claiming each consecutive game could not be solved.) I don't think anyone here is saying Dota 2 won't be solved eventually or that its complexity is beyond the realm of AI (as was claimed of Chess/Go in the past). They're just saying this particular achievement isn't actually meaningful progress. It's using known techniques to do something those techniques are known to do.

Funnnny 9y ago

It worths noting that, shortly after they offer SF arcana (extremely rare item), 50 people did go and beat the bot on the spot.

derimagia 9y ago
Well, almost all of them did the same strategy - I'm curious once the first few "strategies" how many people will be able to beat it.
yskchu 9y ago
The strategy that was used, seems to be surprise the AI and mess up it's decision tree: The general strategy is to win by claiming first tower. At 0:00, you aggro the enemy creep wave so that they start following you. Then you walk around in a circle around the jungle, and the enemy wave will start to form a congo line that will follow you around. You then path around the jungle so that on the next wave spawn, you can aggro the wave again and continue to walk around in circles. The AI will burn glyph when your creep wave hits the tower, and for some reason it can't really decide between chasing you or defending the tower. So after about 5 minutes of doing this, your creep waves will eventually destroy the tower and you win the 1v1. From https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_were_defeated_atleast_50_times/dliundl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_w...
- KVFinn 9y ago
  Someone else said they did by using their own courier to bait the bot too deep. Sounded like a harder way to win than this though.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  This is, admittedly, a weird enough strategy that a human player would probably get flustered and respond with suboptimal choices, just like the AI did. A human would probably adapt to the situation more quickly, though. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a few people are trying this strategy in pub games now, just for shits and giggles. :)

darod 9y ago

While the author is probably right and this is no huge breakthrough in AI/ML, it is yet another example of AI/ML being able to do an activity that surpasses a human's ability. I am still waiting for an example of how AI/ML will complement a human's life as opposed to demonstrating an area where a human can be replaced.

JSONwebtoken 9y ago
How can you not see applications where replacing humans complements another human's life? I'm sure if you thought about it, you could see how self driving cars, real time translation, image to text for visually impaired, could be of some benefit to peoples lives? These applications might be automating a human out of a job, but they are also far superior at their narrow task. You can argue the total societal value net the societal cost of putting some people out of jobs, but saying you can't think of any application where AI can complement peoples lives is being intentionally hyperbolic and is a bad start to a discussion.
- darod 9y ago
  In this application who does this AI serve? A self driving car doesn't help me to become a better driver. It removes me from the driving equation all together.

candiodari 9y ago

> Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that's a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too. I hate that people actually see things this way. Regulation to prevent AIs from taking over the world will never happen, because nation states won't cooperate on such rules [1]. Additionally you can't catch people using AIs to determine their actions. BUT what regulation can do is prevent people from competing with a few of Larry Page's and Elon Musk's businesses. [1] https://www.rt.com/news/395375-kalashnikov-automated-neural-network-gun/ https://www.rt.com/news/395375-kalashnikov-automated-neural-...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 9y ago
There are other dangers besides "taking over the world". In fact, Elon Musk should know, since his company's AI already got people killed.
sweden 9y ago
The "taking of the world" scenario is a too narrow view of the whole complexity of AI regulation. There are other more realistic and important scenarios that need to be addressed, for example: AI's default behaviour when challenged with a possibility of a car accident on a self driving system. Should the car try to avoid the accident by jumping of a cliff, sacrificing the life of the driver and of the people inside the car, or should it hit the next car making the accident worse for the other person but potentially saving the life of the people inside the car?
- mizzao 9y ago
  You must be thinking of http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ But in practice, this is more a study of people's ethical tendencies around the world than a practical way to address AI decision-making in bad situations.

zaroth 9y ago

Where do bots go to fight other bots in millions of games, and algorithms compete for superiority? I assume there must be an ongoing "marketplace" to match bots and run the simulations.

astrojams 9y ago
They play themselves. No need to play other bots.
- zaroth 9y ago
  Is that a fact? You don't ever see better performance by training in a heterogeneous environment? Or just, no one does it this way?

nbkvjones 9y ago

there was a "discussion" on nadota.com about the bot and the semipro player that openai used to test chimed in. apparently the set of items the bot chose to purchase from was limited[1] and recommended by the semipro tester. As someone who knows next to nothing about ai, my question is this: the bot was announced on stage as blank slate, dumped into dota, and built entirely from grinding countless games against itself; is it reasonable to pitch it this way while having this item constraint from an outside source? I also wonder what else was recommended by the tester, and then constrained. the "discussion" is linked below and the tester is the user sammyboy. Here's a warning though: nadota is 99% trolling, hate, idiocy, and garbage. [1] http://nadota.com/showthread.php?41718-terrifying-1v1-mid-AI-dumpsters-suma1l-arteezy-with-ease&p=1807415&viewfull=1#post1807415 http://nadota.com/showthread.php?41718-terrifying-1v1-mid-AI...

dennybritz 9y ago
The other big "hardcoded" constraint is most likely the usage of the bot API. The API itself is complex with lots of functionality and I would assume that researchers were extremely smart about picking out just the right API calls that are needed to make it work. That's very different from and much easier than training an agent based on raw keyboard/mouse input.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gdb 9y ago
(I work at OpenAI.) We'll have another blog post coming in the next few days. But as a sneak peek: we use self-play to learn everything that depends on an interaction with the opponent. Didn't need to with those that don't (e.g. fixed item builds, separately learned creep block).
- RSchaeffer 9y ago
  Can you give us a sneak peak of OpenAI's approach to 5v5 Dota? :D
- hayd 9y ago

jarsin 9y ago

All the bots have to do is spew tons of toxic crap in chat. Then they will be like any other real life DOTA player.

perishabledave 9y ago
I think the root of that is the high reliance on teammates and the level of commitment each game takes. Unlike League there is no early surrender, so if you’re in a rough game you have to endure the full duration which can last around an hour. If you feel like it’s your teammate, who is probably randomly paired with you, that is failing it’s easy to get frustrated. This is one of the many things that make Dota either extremely frustrating or extremely satisfying.

aorth 9y ago

I'm still just trying to figure out what "Dota" stands for. Is it an acronym? Neither the Valve website or Wikipedia clarify this!

spaceseaman 9y ago
DefenseOfTheAncients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
idle_processor 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients
detaro 9y ago
The original Warcraft mod was called Defense of the Ancients, the Valve title Dota 2 as far as I know always has been just Dota
natural219 9y ago
Funny story. The original term "DOTA" was an acronym, for "Defense of the Ancients", which was the original Warcraft 3 mod of which the later game, "Dota 2", was based. Since the original DOTA was a community mod using assets from a commercial (IE, trademarked) Blizzard property, it was in sort of a gray area in regards to re-commercialization of what was essentially the same gameplay and characters. To avoid further standing for Blizzard to reclaim its trademarked properties, Valve registered the trademark "Dota" specifically as a word that doesn't refer to anything, officially eliminating the acronym from the name and somehow distancing the new engine from trouble with the trademark.

JonathanLIabc 9y ago

I see Elon Musk tweets as a warning about the potential of AI, not a hype of AI nor the current stage of AI. The most impressive part to me is that the bots are self-learned. On the other hand, AlphaGo is supervisored. They are different (not to say which one is better).

DSrcl 9y ago

A lot of dota's mechanics is designed with the assumption that the player is human -- e.g. skills that can be programmed to be released perfectly but are hard for a human (even pro) to do so reliably (Shadow Fiend's raze is one of them).

oldstrangers 9y ago

Surely the author knows that neither Chess nor Go have been "solved". Qoutes or no qoutes, it's still very inaccurate. I'd also argue that chess and go are both vastly more difficult problem sets. We literally do not have the computational power to solve a game of chess and it's projected that we won't for another 50-100 years.

craigsmansion 9y ago

I hope someone can clarify. What are the definitions of AI and game complexity in this field? These all sound like very exiting developments. As I read about them a lot of times games such as Dota and Starcraft are touted as more complex than Chess or Go, but--at least with Starcraft, the AIs are limited in their number of actions to level the playing field. Isn't that like claiming humans can run faster than greyhounds, provided that the greyhounds only get to use two legs? Or maybe claiming that humans are better at chess when computers are restricted to the maximum human ply depth? I also noticed a claim--again, in a Starcraft related article--that the AIs previously couldn't beat the build-in AIs (the computer players). What type of AIs are considered as challengers here? Only blank-slate self learning AIs?

lyndonjohnsonbe 9y ago
I know a little about AI in the first starcraft. Writing the AI to use the same interface as humans is difficult. To lower the bar for more people to play around with it, the AI reads data from memory directly. This creates an imbalance that they try to balance out with extra rules like rate limiting.
Tangokat 9y ago
The reason why the AI is limited in number of actions is because the strategy is interesting, not so much the mechanical skill (think aimbots in FPS games). We know the AI will be better at clicking and moving units and would be capable of moving every unit optimally at all times. But is it also capable of coming up with creative strategies that humans could use as well? I think both situations would be interesting to be honest. Have an unrestricted AI and a restricted AI - using ML they would probably develop vastly different ways of playing.

dukovni 9y ago

I would like to see an AI based search engine. So if I search on something it gives the CORRECT results back, not some SEO'd results and almost always useless. A search engine like this could make Google search looks like outdated tech.

musashizak 9y ago

There is top hype in ai but also in neuroscience. Actually there aren't scientific evidences that mind and coscience are materiale and born from the brain. Also the emotions are really important in the logic and thinking process. So without coscience and enotions we can't have real think on a machine.

itchyjunk 9y ago

Is no one upset that they claimed `learned from self play only` when clearly it isn't? Creep blocking ? really? it learned a left over feature in original DOTA from warcraft in a new stand alone DOTA 2 client strictly on self play? And that distinct animation canceling the bot does? Look at amateur players and pro players (pro players do it more often then actually needed to `warm up` the muscles, similar to extra key strokes in SC). I wouldn't be surprised if the bot was trained in tons of pro openings. :/ Why not be clear about what has been done? Deepmind has said they do supervised learning first and other stuff on top of that. My guess is something similar to that happened.

velobro 9y ago

The bot did not have their creep blocks hard coded. In the event the player purposefully messed up his block to see if the bot would respond and it did