I agree with you though I still think what the OpenAI team has achieved is impressive. Dota has two levels: the strategic and the tactical. The AI is very good

I agree with you though I still think what the OpenAI team has achieved is impressive. Dota has two levels: the strategic and the tactical. The AI is very good at the tactical level (teamfighting) but poor at the strategic level. Perhaps they could train a "Captain AI" through replay analysis that would direct the player AIs? I could see the Captain AI having various modules to help it decide what should be done next. For example, a drafting module, a module to predict where the enemy players currently are (some kind of threat heatmap?), what the enemy players are likely to do next (i.e., where they will farm, smoking, roshing, etc.), and what items the team needs (i.e., centralized item purchase decisions). I imagine these modules would be trained in an entirely different way from the way the AIs are trained in-game. Technically, I can't help wonder if some kind of hybrid ANN-expert system architecture wouldn't work better. ANNs are rightfully popular due to their effectiveness but they seem so inefficient in this case. A few hand-coded rules could eliminate the basic mistakes the AI makes, and for the rest they could evolve the rules using some type of genetic programming. The latter would still allow the AI to come up with its own novel approach to the game.