My thoughts on the AI's performance so far knowing a bit about both DOTA and machine learning: - Item-usage for things such as smoke and wards (which were rece

My thoughts on the AI's performance so far knowing a bit about both DOTA and machine learning: - Item-usage for things such as smoke and wards (which were recently added to their reportoire) are not well captured by the bots yet. And the buying of wards were confirmed as a scripted event. It seems hard for them to capture the long term sparse reward of these. Smoke might not be needed by a perfect agent, but wards should be. The developer interview noted that it's not very clear what the reward for an agent warding even should be. - Some of the big advantages OpenAI gains are in team fights, where it's 200ms reaction time (upped from 80ms to resemble human reaction time more) still strikes me as something that tilts it into a solid mechanical advantage. On several occasions OpenAI's Lion managed to disable a human player performing (what I assume to be) a move which shouldn't be interruptable. (blink-->shift+ctrl ultimate ability on earthshaker) This could have tilted teamfights in the human team's favor a few times if it wasn't stopped by the "machine-like" reflexes of OpenAI. - Positioning before team fights by OpenAI are scary. There are very few openings, and every individual agent is protected by its team. - Likewise is the map movement scary most of the time. Being able to recall just enough agents back to defend while simultaneously taking out strategic objectives of the human team. Also Blitz(caster) has noted earlier OpenAI's ability to focus on the winnable lanes and sacrifice the others, prioritizing well. (and exploiting map mechanics unknown to most pros until a few years ago) - When the AI takes down a tier 1 tower, they seem to be very quick to take down the remaining tier 1 towers, instantly capitalizing on their map control advantage, and expanding it. Some interesting things / bugs: - Sniper bot throwing multiple spells on the same location right away (even though the damage doesn't stack) effectively simply wasting his mana and cooldowns, for no gain. - Sniper using his ultimate ability to pressure the lower hp characters of the human team continously. Usually it's more often used more as a finisher, and might be an artifact that appears from the AI having access to an unkillable courier that ferries a lot of healing/mana regenerating items. Some additional info learned from the interview of some of the devs: - Incentivizing killing Roshan (a boss character in the middle of the map, which yields a one-time ressurection item for one player, after being killed) is done by varying roshan's HP down to a really low amount, making sure the AI experiences the upside to this. Otherwise it would require all 5 agents gathering there, expending their magical abilities and investing a lot before actually seeing a reward. (which is unlikely to happen) - Game length in self-play sessions are above 60 minutes around 1% of the time.