6 ms·

There are so many ways in which I feel this argument breaks down. * OG would absolutely handily win against any non-professionally-contracted dota team under t

by hug 8y ago

There are so many ways in which I feel this argument breaks down. * OG would absolutely handily win against any non-professionally-contracted dota team under the exact same challenge conditions. (i.e.: OpenAI Five's test was about as good as they could give it at this stage.) * OG's play within the scope of the game was novel, in that they were deliberately picking strategies that OpenAI Five didn't "understand" (i.e.: creep skipping) and still lost. * OpenAI's play was novel, even within the constraints of the pool: No human team would pick the 4-core + CM lineup that OpenAI favoured. Even if you played with that limited hero meta, 4-core would likely not end up being a deliberate strategy picked by human teams with any frequency. * OpenAI's play in all team fights was demonstrably better, playing exactly up to the limits of the heroes they were using and no further. (It is, in fact, OpenAI's teamfight which won them the game.) * A number of the reductions and restrictions in hero-pool were to allow for OG to have a fighting chance: All heroes with controllable illusions or clones were banned because OpenAI had too much of an advantage in "micro". If you sum all of those things up, I think it looks painfully obvious that OpenAI Five, if trained against the full hero pool, would completely and utterly dominate gameplay at the professional human level. It wouldn't even be close.

ctchocula 8y ago
> A number of the reductions and restrictions in hero-pool were to allow for OG to have a fighting chance: All heroes with controllable illusions or clones were banned because OpenAI had too much of an advantage in "micro". This one is not so certain. One of the OG players (Notail) mentioned after the game that the AI definitely had a few weaknesses such as: * AI didn't bother checking the trees after the splitpushing hero disappeared from the map. * AI doesn't handle invisible units well. * AI has poor warding. He said he regretted not exploiting these weaknesses more. There are certain splitpush ("rat Dota") heroes that potentially could have helped OG to the detriment of AI e.g. Antimage, Furion, Morphling, Juggernaut, etc. Instead, what we saw was OG using a non-traditional split push hero (Viper) from the limited hero pool try to split push, which failed because the hero got ganked too often (Viper does not have natural escape mechanism unlike many of those splitpush heroes above and he didn't itemize for splitpush e.g. Shadowblade first item) and it doesn't push very fast. With these splitpush heroes and well-placed observer wards, I think a splitpush-based lineup could possibly take the game. OpenAI's play was very impressive. I did not see this coming after OpenAI lost to some of the weaker pro teams at last year's TI. However, I would give OG even chances at winning a longer series (Bo5 or Bo7) over 5 or 7 days where they could learn from OpenAI's playstyle and figure out strategies on how to exploit them similar to how in longer Dota 2 tournaments, we see initially successful strategies on Day 1 get countered by the tournament final. Another analogy is the 1v1 bot that OpenAI released. When released, even pro players would lose to it. However shortly after, the combined intelligence of the Dota 2 community discovered an exploit where if you lead the enemy creepwave into the jungle, the AI bot glitches out and the human player eventually wins [1]. [1] 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...
- hcnews 8y ago
  > AI didn't bother checking the trees after the splitpushing hero disappeared from the map. This isn't true always, AI did check trees near radiant bot T1 in the co-op match. Also, I am hoping OG competes against OpenAI during this weekend and streams it. It would be exciting to watch.
- Gatsky 8y ago
  Not sure I buy the argument that humans can learn to beat an AI by exploiting its weaknesses. This argument has been made many times. Kasparov said something similar when he lost to Deep Blue, yet not too long after that chess engines became unbeatable.
  - unrealhoang 8y ago
    That argument will fail if the game is “solved”, OpenAI with current limited same-kind-of-heroes hero pool is far from it. OpenAI current heroes pool is just about exact execution/coordination, which in and of itself is amazing nonetheless but strategical heroes like ember spirit/arc warden/nature prophets are those that bring Dota2 to much higher strategical levels.
    - Gatsky 8y ago
      Well maybe, but so far we have seen that AI improves quickly enough that other factors are irrelevant.
xemdetia 8y ago
What I am generally pointing out is that if you had a professional team or a high level amateur team that spent a year practicing a fundamentally different version of the game and they beat OG that really doesn't say a lot. It's like if a pro team played an odd custom game mode against people who played it all the time and already knew some specific gimmicks. Dota just in general is much less a hard input mechanics game compared to most which makes it interesting as a project for AI research but makes dropping in a bunch of players even harder. In my opinion if an FPS game played competitively is 80% raw input skill and practice/20% knowledge of the game, dota is closer to 30%/70%. Putting a Riki mid in the first game and a Slark pick the second game doesn't really tell me a whole lot, since Open AI's team bought dust against Riki and the hero pool says 'early push and win or lose' which generally defeats a Slark that generally needs items this patch (47% win rate at this point). They clearly indicated in prior posts that them buying dust and dealing with invisibility are part of the skills, and it's really not hard to end up with a strategy of while in an attack/aggressive state and see Riki, use dust if available. Many teams use a 4 core/hard 5 strategy at the not top tier and it's reasonably effective. The 4-defend-1/3 core strategy generally only works because Roshan/Aegis is in the game to make that min/maxed core that's ahead take additional chances with less risk and also when there are clear heroes that are just a tier above the rest in the current patch or meta. If you take that out or remove aegis planning from your team 4 core is almost trivially the way to go. Even in my casual experience this is generally how I've ended up playing so maybe it's less surprising to me. Once again I point at given the format was a professional team that is built around a 3 core strategy/mindset really the right team to play in this mode? The two drafts for Open AI were Sniper, Gyro, CM, DP, Sven and CM, Gyro, Sven, WD, Viper. Both of these are push to win at 20 minute drafts and they were played as such. I did not feel like OG did enough ordinary/basic strategies given to carry them to the mid-late game like their drafts indicated they wanted to do (ES, WD, Viper, Riki, SF and Sniper, ES, DP, Slark, Lion). They tried some clear gimmick strategies just to see if the bots were totally broken, if they intended to do creep skipping they would have picked Axe who was in pool. It's hard for me to felt like they played better when it was the natural power spike of their draft, as if Open AI was held off or maybe a more reasonable hero was chosen other than Riki/Slark and a more coherent strategy with what was provided was used it would have been a better game when it hit 30-40 minutes. Instead their experiments with gimmicks didn't really pay off and they lost to the hard push team and didn't have a strong hero set to push out the lanes and create an opportunity if they failed. Also, the Open AI drafts are ones that I feel like I were constantly playing in 2012-2013ish until a lot of the new heroes were added to the pool to make them less popular and relevant as they introduced movement/displacement mechanics that make the original hero pool less practical. Since those new heroes are taken out, this old form got put back in. I really doubt that illusion control/micro control would have really made a difference and if it did I would have actually preferred to see that because that is new and novel. Dota is very different to previous RTS game AI's where every unit if controlled properly was of equal strength and could be maximized. Dota illusions generally are just worse in every dimension and have value in disjointing spells, doing rat things, vision, and maximizing some items/abilities that have fixed attack modifiers but otherwise are not a primary source of damage (100 damage with a 33% damage illusion after 15 armor is like 17 damage which is not a big swing when heroes regenerate constantly). Compare this to mutalisk micro where a perfect division of an attack from a group can mean two or three units instantly killed instead of one which generally would be the limit of human control. Divide and conquer with illusions for attacking purposes I would say is generally a bad strategy because I still believe killing the hero in front of you before attacking the next guy is still probably the best option. I find it hard to believe that perfectly controlled illusions would affect the game in a meaningful way compared to highly skilled players, and would have loved to see that. Sure some really great Meepo players can shine, but the game inherently has solutions to that problem and most others (echo slam, burst magic damage). In fact that's the kind of thing that I enjoy the most out of watching AI driven gameplay is seeing when they push the limits of what humans can even accomplish and to see if I can learn anything from it. There are also plenty of other real world equivalents that once you change the rulesets that other people do better like speed limiting in NASCAR at Talledega, a football team that is better in the snow, or a hockey team that plays in a rink with different dimensions. I just wished that we had ended up with a more reasoned view of what happened and could celebrate their actual achievements in context than saying they beat a pro team at their own game which is kind of where the headlines have been going. This is just fundamentally different to what Alpha Go or Deep Blue did where they soundly and completely conquered on the same playing field.
Ntrails 8y ago
> OG would absolutely handily win against any non-professionally-contracted dota team under the exact same challenge conditions. Because OG are mechanically better than them. Flawless reactions make for a big difference (see euls/hex scripters for the impact of that on a game). Throw in perfect global state and zero mistakes, it becomes very very hard to out-skill. The question that people actually care about is whether the AI can be strategically better. If you watch pro dota you'll see that there are often teams which flash, briefly super strong and then fall off as better teams study them and learn to counter their play. OG themselves have had serious problems with CIS teams that play fast (making them arguably the worst team vs a fast playing AI). The hero pool is also important, as currently it's very limited in offering counters to deathball. > OpenAI Five, if trained against the full hero pool, would completely and utterly dominate gameplay at the professional human level. It wouldn't even be close. Fundamentally disagree. The mechanical advantage increases but the strategic disadvantage also increases. Time will hopefully tell.
- roenxi 8y ago
  > The question that people actually care about is whether the AI can be strategically better. We already know the answer to that; computers dominate humans strategically. There are two types of strategic decisions - those made using maths, and those made by guessing. Computers are perfectly capable of doing both, and better at at least one. Besides, Go is far more strategic than DotA and computers are better than us at Go. The reason we are seeing research in videogames is purely tactical. Historically computers couldn't compete tactically with humans because there were too many variables and decisions to write up an if-then loop that made sense. DotA is 95% a game of mechanical domination, 5% strategic concerns. The strategic concerns could be modelled with some pretty basic Bayesian models and probably be world class; it is item-hero combinations, a few rules about location on the map and guesswork. All the challenge is taking that strategy then implementing it mechanically - doing all the stuff OpenAI 5 is demonstrating regarding jukes, tactical positioning, spell timings and judging relative strength with incomplete information. DotA isn't as fast as it looks either, it is quite a slow game in terms of reflexes. Reflexes tip close games, but positioning tips the average game. OG was losing because computers are just better at estimating margins of safety.

by hug 8y ago

ctchocula 8y ago

> A number of the reductions and restrictions in hero-pool were to allow for OG to have a fighting chance: All heroes with controllable illusions or clones were banned because OpenAI had too much of an advantage in "micro". This one is not so certain. One of the OG players (Notail) mentioned after the game that the AI definitely had a few weaknesses such as: * AI didn't bother checking the trees after the splitpushing hero disappeared from the map. * AI doesn't handle invisible units well. * AI has poor warding. He said he regretted not exploiting these weaknesses more. There are certain splitpush ("rat Dota") heroes that potentially could have helped OG to the detriment of AI e.g. Antimage, Furion, Morphling, Juggernaut, etc. Instead, what we saw was OG using a non-traditional split push hero (Viper) from the limited hero pool try to split push, which failed because the hero got ganked too often (Viper does not have natural escape mechanism unlike many of those splitpush heroes above and he didn't itemize for splitpush e.g. Shadowblade first item) and it doesn't push very fast. With these splitpush heroes and well-placed observer wards, I think a splitpush-based lineup could possibly take the game. OpenAI's play was very impressive. I did not see this coming after OpenAI lost to some of the weaker pro teams at last year's TI. However, I would give OG even chances at winning a longer series (Bo5 or Bo7) over 5 or 7 days where they could learn from OpenAI's playstyle and figure out strategies on how to exploit them similar to how in longer Dota 2 tournaments, we see initially successful strategies on Day 1 get countered by the tournament final. Another analogy is the 1v1 bot that OpenAI released. When released, even pro players would lose to it. However shortly after, the combined intelligence of the Dota 2 community discovered an exploit where if you lead the enemy creepwave into the jungle, the AI bot glitches out and the human player eventually wins [1]. [1] 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...

hcnews 8y ago
> AI didn't bother checking the trees after the splitpushing hero disappeared from the map. This isn't true always, AI did check trees near radiant bot T1 in the co-op match. Also, I am hoping OG competes against OpenAI during this weekend and streams it. It would be exciting to watch.
Gatsky 8y ago
Not sure I buy the argument that humans can learn to beat an AI by exploiting its weaknesses. This argument has been made many times. Kasparov said something similar when he lost to Deep Blue, yet not too long after that chess engines became unbeatable.
- unrealhoang 8y ago
  That argument will fail if the game is “solved”, OpenAI with current limited same-kind-of-heroes hero pool is far from it. OpenAI current heroes pool is just about exact execution/coordination, which in and of itself is amazing nonetheless but strategical heroes like ember spirit/arc warden/nature prophets are those that bring Dota2 to much higher strategical levels.
  - Gatsky 8y ago
    Well maybe, but so far we have seen that AI improves quickly enough that other factors are irrelevant.

xemdetia 8y ago

What I am generally pointing out is that if you had a professional team or a high level amateur team that spent a year practicing a fundamentally different version of the game and they beat OG that really doesn't say a lot. It's like if a pro team played an odd custom game mode against people who played it all the time and already knew some specific gimmicks. Dota just in general is much less a hard input mechanics game compared to most which makes it interesting as a project for AI research but makes dropping in a bunch of players even harder. In my opinion if an FPS game played competitively is 80% raw input skill and practice/20% knowledge of the game, dota is closer to 30%/70%. Putting a Riki mid in the first game and a Slark pick the second game doesn't really tell me a whole lot, since Open AI's team bought dust against Riki and the hero pool says 'early push and win or lose' which generally defeats a Slark that generally needs items this patch (47% win rate at this point). They clearly indicated in prior posts that them buying dust and dealing with invisibility are part of the skills, and it's really not hard to end up with a strategy of while in an attack/aggressive state and see Riki, use dust if available. Many teams use a 4 core/hard 5 strategy at the not top tier and it's reasonably effective. The 4-defend-1/3 core strategy generally only works because Roshan/Aegis is in the game to make that min/maxed core that's ahead take additional chances with less risk and also when there are clear heroes that are just a tier above the rest in the current patch or meta. If you take that out or remove aegis planning from your team 4 core is almost trivially the way to go. Even in my casual experience this is generally how I've ended up playing so maybe it's less surprising to me. Once again I point at given the format was a professional team that is built around a 3 core strategy/mindset really the right team to play in this mode? The two drafts for Open AI were Sniper, Gyro, CM, DP, Sven and CM, Gyro, Sven, WD, Viper. Both of these are push to win at 20 minute drafts and they were played as such. I did not feel like OG did enough ordinary/basic strategies given to carry them to the mid-late game like their drafts indicated they wanted to do (ES, WD, Viper, Riki, SF and Sniper, ES, DP, Slark, Lion). They tried some clear gimmick strategies just to see if the bots were totally broken, if they intended to do creep skipping they would have picked Axe who was in pool. It's hard for me to felt like they played better when it was the natural power spike of their draft, as if Open AI was held off or maybe a more reasonable hero was chosen other than Riki/Slark and a more coherent strategy with what was provided was used it would have been a better game when it hit 30-40 minutes. Instead their experiments with gimmicks didn't really pay off and they lost to the hard push team and didn't have a strong hero set to push out the lanes and create an opportunity if they failed. Also, the Open AI drafts are ones that I feel like I were constantly playing in 2012-2013ish until a lot of the new heroes were added to the pool to make them less popular and relevant as they introduced movement/displacement mechanics that make the original hero pool less practical. Since those new heroes are taken out, this old form got put back in. I really doubt that illusion control/micro control would have really made a difference and if it did I would have actually preferred to see that because that is new and novel. Dota is very different to previous RTS game AI's where every unit if controlled properly was of equal strength and could be maximized. Dota illusions generally are just worse in every dimension and have value in disjointing spells, doing rat things, vision, and maximizing some items/abilities that have fixed attack modifiers but otherwise are not a primary source of damage (100 damage with a 33% damage illusion after 15 armor is like 17 damage which is not a big swing when heroes regenerate constantly). Compare this to mutalisk micro where a perfect division of an attack from a group can mean two or three units instantly killed instead of one which generally would be the limit of human control. Divide and conquer with illusions for attacking purposes I would say is generally a bad strategy because I still believe killing the hero in front of you before attacking the next guy is still probably the best option. I find it hard to believe that perfectly controlled illusions would affect the game in a meaningful way compared to highly skilled players, and would have loved to see that. Sure some really great Meepo players can shine, but the game inherently has solutions to that problem and most others (echo slam, burst magic damage). In fact that's the kind of thing that I enjoy the most out of watching AI driven gameplay is seeing when they push the limits of what humans can even accomplish and to see if I can learn anything from it. There are also plenty of other real world equivalents that once you change the rulesets that other people do better like speed limiting in NASCAR at Talledega, a football team that is better in the snow, or a hockey team that plays in a rink with different dimensions. I just wished that we had ended up with a more reasoned view of what happened and could celebrate their actual achievements in context than saying they beat a pro team at their own game which is kind of where the headlines have been going. This is just fundamentally different to what Alpha Go or Deep Blue did where they soundly and completely conquered on the same playing field.

Ntrails 8y ago

> OG would absolutely handily win against any non-professionally-contracted dota team under the exact same challenge conditions. Because OG are mechanically better than them. Flawless reactions make for a big difference (see euls/hex scripters for the impact of that on a game). Throw in perfect global state and zero mistakes, it becomes very very hard to out-skill. The question that people actually care about is whether the AI can be strategically better. If you watch pro dota you'll see that there are often teams which flash, briefly super strong and then fall off as better teams study them and learn to counter their play. OG themselves have had serious problems with CIS teams that play fast (making them arguably the worst team vs a fast playing AI). The hero pool is also important, as currently it's very limited in offering counters to deathball. > OpenAI Five, if trained against the full hero pool, would completely and utterly dominate gameplay at the professional human level. It wouldn't even be close. Fundamentally disagree. The mechanical advantage increases but the strategic disadvantage also increases. Time will hopefully tell.

roenxi 8y ago
> The question that people actually care about is whether the AI can be strategically better. We already know the answer to that; computers dominate humans strategically. There are two types of strategic decisions - those made using maths, and those made by guessing. Computers are perfectly capable of doing both, and better at at least one. Besides, Go is far more strategic than DotA and computers are better than us at Go. The reason we are seeing research in videogames is purely tactical. Historically computers couldn't compete tactically with humans because there were too many variables and decisions to write up an if-then loop that made sense. DotA is 95% a game of mechanical domination, 5% strategic concerns. The strategic concerns could be modelled with some pretty basic Bayesian models and probably be world class; it is item-hero combinations, a few rules about location on the map and guesswork. All the challenge is taking that strategy then implementing it mechanically - doing all the stuff OpenAI 5 is demonstrating regarding jukes, tactical positioning, spell timings and judging relative strength with incomplete information. DotA isn't as fast as it looks either, it is quite a slow game in terms of reflexes. Reflexes tip close games, but positioning tips the average game. OG was losing because computers are just better at estimating margins of safety.