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I think GP was exactly right when he said AI is amazing at micro, but that humans could win using macro pressure. Open AI 5 is an incredible achievement, but fo

I think GP was exactly right when he said AI is amazing at micro, but that humans could win using macro pressure. Open AI 5 is an incredible achievement, but for Dota players it hasn't solved Dota. The best analogy is probably something like playing a fixed strategy in Poker, but never varying it; your opponents will eventually figure what your strategy is and ways to exploit it. What you mentioned with having a courier for each hero is actually a well-known tactic called "bottle-crow" and was popular in Filipino Dota from 2010-2015. Each support hero would buy a dedicated crow for each lane and a bottle. Then the cores would ferry the bottle to themselves constantly from base, but this tactic got nerfed to death with the change "crow flies at half speed with an empty bottle". You are right that OG didn't deal well with this constant source of health regeneration, but it was largely limited to the laning phase. After the laning phase ends, humans can use their superior macro (i.e. understanding of map movement) which is a definite weakness of the AI. Against the simple AI that comes built-in to Dota 2, you can be behind by a ton and exploit splitpushing against the AI, because doing any structural damage against buildings will force the AI (who are gathered up for a push) back, and you will win if you drag the game sufficiently into the lategame. There are indications that similar tactics can be used against the OpenAI 5, which is bad countering invisible items/heroes and playing against splitpush [1]. Deciding whether or not to continue to push and which heroes to send back to defend is one of the hardest strategic decisions to make in the game, even for humans. The finals of one of the TIs, NaVi vs. Alliance, was lost on getting such a decision wrong. Eliminating some key splitpush heroes minimized the probability that OpenAI 5 would have been forced into having to make such a decision. OpenAI 5 would have lost against OG if any of the following had been satisfied: - had the entire heropool been available (certain natural splitpushing heroes like Furion, Tinker, Phantom Lancer, etc.) - had the series gone long enough for them to uncover AI's weaknesses (which were apparent to the viewers and later teams). OG's captain even explicitly said "Give us 5 games and we will figure it out." - had the prizepool been big enough for OG to take the game seriously enough to warrant picking a splitpushing strategy which is considered "cowardly" in some circles. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/beyilz/openai_live_updates_thread_lessons_on_how_to_beat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/beyilz/openai_live_u...

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Lmao, imagine calling AdmiralBulldog’s primary strategy “cowardly”. Sorry for the rare persona break, but Dota happens to be my old passion. It was a bit like saying that Magnus wouldn’t play a certain chess strategy because it would be “cowardly.” I assure you, the top teams are there to win. They also saw how ungodly effective OpenAI’s 1v1 bot was, and everyone respected its skill. You can make those claims, but I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. More specifically, I agree that OpenAI solved a limited subset of Dota. But I disagree that OG would have “figured it out” under the specific rules the bot was trained on. It’s a totally different game, and it’s nothing like bottle crow (which I was fond of back in 2010). It also wasn’t bottles, because only the mid lane buys a bottle. The other lanes were usually health regen to prevent your cores from having to go back to base - which of course the AI did here, but to a ridiculous degree that no one was expecting. Which is more likely: that Dota happens to be the one game that AI can’t become superhuman at, or OpenAI didn’t train quite long enough to prove it?
- ctchocula 5y ago
  Yep, we'll have to agree to disagree. One reason I disagree is that Dota (and Starcraft 2) are both games of imperfect information (more like Poker than Chess or Go). That means a lot of the time, the game revolves around deception and subterfuge. If you've ever had to hunt down an enemy splitpusher and have to decide between spending 10s checking a hiding place and having a chance at getting a potentially game-winning kill, but also having a chance of not finding them and wasting your time, you'll know what I'm talking about. There's no optimal strategy, because all strategies have weaknesses to be exploited (e.g. In BW, if Terran knows you as Protoss always go greedy such as 12 Nexus, they can punish you with BBS. However if you play safe, they can play greedy themselves with 14CC, so there are a lot of mindgames.) After AlphaZero's victories or DeepBlue's for that matter, professional Go and Chess players could find no weaknesses. Nada. After OpenAi 5 became available, a professional player compiled a list of 20 weaknesses that I'm not certain OpenAI can ever fix (see link above). How do you tell the neural net when to dust or ward? The same story with DeepMind's AlphaStar. Despite playing a good macro game, players online have figured out lots of ways to cheese it (e.g. send just one unit will cause all workers to be pulled and stop mining). I understand Poker's been "solved", but these computer games with much larger action spaces and imperfect information might turn out to be significantly harder to pin down than Chess or Go. There are enough edgecases that it's a much better representation of real life problems like self-driving cars (negotiating a merge for example).

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Lmao, imagine calling AdmiralBulldog’s primary strategy “cowardly”. Sorry for the rare persona break, but Dota happens to be my old passion. It was a bit like saying that Magnus wouldn’t play a certain chess strategy because it would be “cowardly.” I assure you, the top teams are there to win. They also saw how ungodly effective OpenAI’s 1v1 bot was, and everyone respected its skill. You can make those claims, but I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. More specifically, I agree that OpenAI solved a limited subset of Dota. But I disagree that OG would have “figured it out” under the specific rules the bot was trained on. It’s a totally different game, and it’s nothing like bottle crow (which I was fond of back in 2010). It also wasn’t bottles, because only the mid lane buys a bottle. The other lanes were usually health regen to prevent your cores from having to go back to base - which of course the AI did here, but to a ridiculous degree that no one was expecting. Which is more likely: that Dota happens to be the one game that AI can’t become superhuman at, or OpenAI didn’t train quite long enough to prove it?

ctchocula 5y ago
Yep, we'll have to agree to disagree. One reason I disagree is that Dota (and Starcraft 2) are both games of imperfect information (more like Poker than Chess or Go). That means a lot of the time, the game revolves around deception and subterfuge. If you've ever had to hunt down an enemy splitpusher and have to decide between spending 10s checking a hiding place and having a chance at getting a potentially game-winning kill, but also having a chance of not finding them and wasting your time, you'll know what I'm talking about. There's no optimal strategy, because all strategies have weaknesses to be exploited (e.g. In BW, if Terran knows you as Protoss always go greedy such as 12 Nexus, they can punish you with BBS. However if you play safe, they can play greedy themselves with 14CC, so there are a lot of mindgames.) After AlphaZero's victories or DeepBlue's for that matter, professional Go and Chess players could find no weaknesses. Nada. After OpenAi 5 became available, a professional player compiled a list of 20 weaknesses that I'm not certain OpenAI can ever fix (see link above). How do you tell the neural net when to dust or ward? The same story with DeepMind's AlphaStar. Despite playing a good macro game, players online have figured out lots of ways to cheese it (e.g. send just one unit will cause all workers to be pulled and stop mining). I understand Poker's been "solved", but these computer games with much larger action spaces and imperfect information might turn out to be significantly harder to pin down than Chess or Go. There are enough edgecases that it's a much better representation of real life problems like self-driving cars (negotiating a merge for example).