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OpenAI Five at Dota 2 – The International [video]

209 points by nerform 8y ago

sh4z 8y ago
Updated the ruleset with regular couriers! Will be a lot different from the earlier matches. I'm guessing humans can win if they find "cheese" plays that the bot has not found during it's practice.
jsheard 8y ago
For context: OpenAI is playing against a professional team this time, unlike the event a few weeks ago where the humans were skilled but not active pros or used to playing together. This team isn't the strongest (they placed 17-18th during this TI) but OpenAI will play again tomorrow and the day after, presumably against progressively better teams.
- roenxi 8y ago
  > his team isn't the strongest (they placed 17-18th during this TI) Oh, is that all :P. Assuming a 2x buffer for players who are good but not competitive, there are maybe 200 humans in the world who are better at DotA. If mastery is 1 in 10,000, these people are masters.
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
    Many believe that it’s an exponential curve so there’s a substantial difference between the first and twentieth place teams.
    - whymauri 8y ago
      Looking historically at team ELO and how squads have gone on 27-series win streaks, this is probably right. Though I think the gap between "low-tier" TI teams and TI winners is getting much tighter. Group B at TI8 was so close the difference between upper-bracket and lower-bracket was 1 game for most of the teams.
      - noxvilleza 8y ago
        *Elo, not ELO :)
        whymauri 8y ago
        lol, good catch. Gotta give Arpad his credit :)
    - PeCaN 8y ago
      Even if this is true, pain is one of the unpredictable teams that can take a game off anyone. They went 3-1 against Liquid at the Birmingham Major. Actually, "weaker" (top 20) teams regularly do take games off better teams so I don't think there's much evidence for an exponential skill increase between teams.
  - nindalf 8y ago
    No, there are way more than 200 players better than Pain, all due respect to them. That’s clear by looking at leaderboards. But team dynamics and synergy in this game matter so much that they are definitely in the top 20 of teams regardless of their individual skill. Seeing OpenAI do so well against this team impressed the hell out of me.
    - Strom 8y ago
      A really big factor making up your ranking on the leaderboard is your ability to play in a chaotic game where your team and yourself aren't on the same page. Just taking the top players from the leaderboard (who aren't already on a top team) and putting them together makes up a team that is good enough to win against other similar random teams (hence their high rank) but can't win against actual teams, which is evidenced all the time in the open qualifers where actual teams that consist of lower ranked players beat them. TI open qualifer / regional qualifer / actual event placements are way better indicators on how good a team is than pub leaderboards.
    - throw_away_777 8y ago
      The way TI is structured they invite one team from South America. So Pain is likely not in top 20, but still a very good team.
      - nindalf 8y ago
        I know how TI is structured, but I’m confident they’re top 20 anyway. Which team not at TI is better, do you think? Complexity? Navi? I don’t think so.
- sambroner 8y ago
  Seems like playing one of the best 200 players in the world is a reasonable proxy for a top tier player. I'm unfamiliar with DOTA rules, but does anyone know if there are any limitations on the openAI team? e.g. Things like keystrokes per minute, scroll speed, etc
  - jsheard 8y ago
    During the last OpenAI showmatch the bots had an artificial 200ms reaction time imposed on them, I assume it's the same here but I'm not sure.
    - sambroner 8y ago
      Thanks.
    - larkeith 8y ago
      I don't believe this is the case, as OpenAI was able to hex (an immediate disable) Earthshaker before he got off Echoslam (a spell with no cast delay except the time to click the key).
      - def_true_false 8y ago
        The ES player didn't queue his abilities so there was delay between blinking and casting echo. Someone counted the frames and it was well over the 200ms minimum.
        el_devo 8y ago
        Here is a post from the Dota 2 subreddit discussing the timing with proof that OpenAI's reaction was over the 200ms minimum: https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/94vdpm/openai_hex_was_within_the_200ms_response_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/94vdpm/openai_hex_wa...
        Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
- nopinsight 8y ago
  In general, the differences among a top echelon of human expertise are vastly smaller than those between humans and other kinds of agents, animals or AIs. We all share similar cognitive architecture for handling complex domains after all. Once OpenAI Five defeat 3-4 pro teams convincingly, it could be presumed from the observation above that they will defeat any other top teams within a year at most, if sufficient resources are used for improving the AI. An exception is when a fundamental hidden weakness is found in the AI. Another confounding factor is major rule changes where the game essentially becomes a different one.
  - chibg10 8y ago
    > Once OpenAI Five defeat 3-4 pro teams convincingly, it could be presumed from the observation above that they will defeat any other top teams within a year at most, if sufficient resources are used for improving the AI. An exception is when a fundamental hidden weakness is found in the AI. Not sure how you intended this, but the hero pool constraint is actually an enormous advantage for the AI. The current hero pool isn't, by any means, random. I don't know OpenAI selected it, but it's highly conducive to OpenAI Five's strengths--deathballing, mechanics, teamfight coordination, etc. It lacks essentially all of the heroes that humans would normally pick to counter that strategy. Playing on an unrestricted hero set would test OpenAI Five in entirely different ways than playing on the current hero pool would. I would not be comfortable betting on your statement at all.
    - noxvilleza 8y ago
      > The current hero pool isn't, by any means, random. Some of the restrictions they've discussed - like initially they couldn't handle with illusions, summons or invisibility at all. They obviously dropped the invis restriction. My feeling is that the AI just learned that of the given pool, 'deathball' was the best (and specific heroes like Gyrocopter/Sniper were the most effective carries).
    - ajuc 8y ago
      > I don't know OpenAI selected it, but it's highly conducive to OpenAI Five's strengths--deathballing, mechanics, teamfight coordination, etc. It lacks essentially all of the heroes that humans would normally pick to counter that strategy. Isn't it the other way around - openai adjusted to the hero pool to come up with its' strategy, because it was trained on this hero pool. If hero pool had only late-game melee carries - I assume openai would come up with a strategy that works with that.
ggregoire 8y ago
Wait… the big news here is steam.tv. I heard the rumors but didn't know it was up?! (it seems to work only for their own event at this time tho.)
- kawsper 8y ago
  They announced it a couple of days ago: http://blog.dota2.com/2018/08/the-main-event-with-new-steam-broadcasting/ http://blog.dota2.com/2018/08/the-main-event-with-new-steam-... It still have limitations and bugs, yesterday it just wouldn't load for me, but it works now, and you are unable to watch yesterdays content.
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    The UI is very wonky, definitely looks like it was rushed last minute to release for TI. That "Watch with friends" button is pretty messed up if you're logged in. Also if you're logged in and "close" the stream tab, I don't see any way to get back to it. Definitely a work in progress.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  I didn't even look at the URL, I assumed this was a twitch link. Makes sense they would showcase it on their flagship game though
- symlinkk 8y ago
  Looks like it's built with React
- dang 8y ago
  A mod changed the URL from https://steam.tv/dota2/ https://steam.tv/dota2/ after this comment was posted, presumably because the live stream was over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824373).
sama 8y ago
We are playing with regular couriers for the first time! And against a pro team.
- hamhamed 8y ago
  Pain isn't the toughest of opponents at TI. Will they be playing vs a team that is currently still alive in the bracket? So far it seems Pain is kind of controlling the game at least much better vs the caster team (99th percentile)
  - noxvilleza 8y ago
    They're still the ~19th best team in the world.
    - rajahafify 8y ago
      No. TI is not a meritocracy. Pain came from the weakest region in the world. Without the SA slot, they wouldn't even be in TI.
      - xfer 8y ago
        And you know that, how? Have you seen them fight against other region teams that failed to qualify?
        andreime 8y ago
        Maybe, like me, he follows the pro scene. People complain a lot that Europe is stacked (meaning stronger teams) compared to regions like NA, and they get the same amount of slots a TI. South America is probably the weakest region. I think a lot of people following the competitive scene would agree with what he was saying - that Pain is not top 20 in the world.
        xfer 8y ago
        I follow the pro scene too, nobody sensible would say they are not top 20, can you name a team that deserved to be in TI other than pain here from any region? > People complain a lot that Europe is stacked (meaning stronger teams) compared to regions like NA Really? Go ahead and name an EU team that is not playing in TI that should be here. EU is top heavy and they get to TI easily, other than that not much. SA is weaker region for sure, that's why they have 1 team from their region and they deserve to be there.
sama 8y ago
rigged IMO
- ISL 8y ago
  Citation needed?
  - icelancer 8y ago
    Look at the poster name.
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    Sam Altman is a jokester.
- hamhamed 8y ago
  well, there's constantly empty chairs on the face cam whenever it's on the OpenAI hero, so something must be fishy ;)
bxio 8y ago
This time, OpenAI is playing a normal game without restrictions. Team Human got thoroughly trashed last time vs OpenAI in a game with hero restrictions. Go OpenAI! I For One welcome our new robot overlords.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Not quite a normal game with no restrictions because it's a pre-selected hero pick from a limited pool instead of a full draft, but it's still very cool. Interesting that OpenAI seems to prefer deathballing, but it makes sense: its main advantage over humans is probably tactical and in teamfights, and 5-man maximizes your options. The human strategy should probably be to split push, but one of the commentators (who is also a pro who played against OpenAI earlier) says that is very difficult because OpenAI can apply pressure everywhere.
  - balls187 8y ago
    I recall reading somewhere that the real advantage AI had was in it's ability to come up with bizarre strategies that confuse human opponents.
    - ionforce 8y ago
      I'm skeptical that you read this somewhere. AI doesn't "come up" with strategies. It's likely something that's been discovered in training and then mechanically repeated. But it doesn't "come up" with strategies out of nowhere.
      - tree_of_item 8y ago
        Why doesn't it come up with strategies? The program is doing a massive search over an action space, of course it will find things there.
        balls187 8y ago
        It's a dumb semantics argument about using the phrase "come up."
21 8y ago
How can I tell looking at the screen who is winning? Is there a score somewhere? Maybe the left side sliders?
- jdoliner 8y ago
  The best things to look at are the gold difference (below the top bar) and the towers remaining (on either side of the top bar). But neither fully captures who's winning. Dota is remarkable for how possible comebacks are, so it's often hard to say with certainty who's winning at a certain moment.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yelnatz 8y ago
  In general its the number of towers they've destroyed + number of kills. Not always a great indicator but you can tell who's behind.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  A rule of thumb for determining who is winning is the delta net worth: the money icon that appears under the kill counter at the top for the team who's ahead. (as of posting, OpenAI is ahead)
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  Its not always exactly obvious. But generally speaking, number of kills + towers destroyed is always a good indicator. Another good indicator is overall networth, the team winning usually has 3 out of their 5 players at the top 5 ranks in money value. One thing you can see is which team is constantly defending and which is constantly attacking. That's a pretty good indicator too. No guarantees though, games have been known to flop and be unpredictable, mostly due to respawn timers / buybacks lategame. Late game is super critical on who gets first kill generally
- noxvilleza 8y ago
  Net Worth Difference is the best single indicator, but there are additional factors like tower difference, item purchasing decisions, hero composition, hero aliveness & buyback status, aegis, etc. Some specific heroes also wildly differ from the norm for each one of these factors. The game is very complex :()
alexedw 8y ago
Looks like OpenAI just lost Match #1.
jjcm 8y ago
Overall a very good game. Definitely smart on PAIN gaming's part to delay the game and wait until the mid game (where OpenAI traditionally excels the most) is over in order to rely on their stronger carry. I think the lack of 5 couriers really showed where OpenAI had a crutch the last game it played. Excited to see the improvements as this goes on, and I suspect that next year we'll see the OpenAI team beat the #1 ranked human team.
- nindalf 8y ago
  Loved the strategy used by Pain. They recognised that fighting OpenAI wasn’t working so they actively avoided fights. They recognised strategic shortcomings, like the AI’s reluctance to pressure lanes and exploited it. What disappointed me a bit is that the AI didn’t make a concerted effort to win the game when it was strongest.
  - chibg10 8y ago
    This type of playstyle adjustment by Pain is just standard Dota strategy tbh. When your team is losing teamfights, you avoid teamfights unless you know you have an imminent advantage (terrain, towers, initiation, numbers, etc.). A big part of avoiding teamfights is splitting up and putting pressure on lanes so that the other team has to split up to defend their towers. If they are split up and defending their towers, they can't group up and force fights at objectives (Roshan, towers, w/e) that your team would have to group up to defend. Not to take anything away from Pain--just making it to TI is enough to prove that they're excellent Dota players.
Analemma_ 8y ago
Hooray, humans not obsolete quite yet! Very good play from OpenAI though, even though it ultimately lost. It looked very scary how fast it could switch between dominating 5-man teamfights to splitting up and ganking or pushing down towers.
symlinkk 8y ago
Their reaction time seemed way too fast. It was entertaining to watch though.
- noxvilleza 8y ago
  It's actually internationally delayed reactions to make it more fair (200ms of delay added).
  - mbbutler 8y ago
    That's what OpenAI claims, but there have been too many insta-hex/euls moments for me to believe that. Players are shift-queing blink+AoE spells and getting hexed in between the two abilities. That's way faster than a 200 ms reaction time. I think OpenAI might have a bug with how they're adding reaction time.
    - foobaw 8y ago
      Someone did an analysis on this because it seemed like insta hex the last time they played, but they were all pre-queued and the 200ms turned out to be accurate.
      - tgb 8y ago
        Yeah my guess is that perfect timing-awareness and 200ms reaction time looks a lot like 0ms reaction time. Just start the action 200ms earlier - that'll work in enough cases that you'll look like you have perfect timing.
  - makoz 8y ago
    Watching the match there seemed to be a crazy amount of instant Euls and what not. I doubt a player is about to react to a blink initiation and click Euls/Hex in the same amount of time. It'd be a lot more fair for them to calibrate against the reaction time of pro-players across the same scenarios. (I doubt pros can hit 200ms consistently)
Leary 8y ago
Outfought the humans in teamfights, other than that not sure how much long term strategic thought was shown.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
  OpenAI looked bad in the mid-game and non-competitive in the late-game. The team fight stuff is frustrating since it’s just learning perfect rotations where computers should obviously excel. Their continuing use of cool downs on creeps in the late game was baffling.
- NegatioN 8y ago
  Totally agree. I was very hopeful after seeing the benchmark match, but openai definitely looked a lot more naked today. Long term (5-10 mins) looked really weak when it really mattered. It just wanted toget team fights and capitalize on it to take down objectives later. I think I saw somewhere that they are training to consider a time frame of a minute or so, so it makes sense. But it's also slightly disappointing since these games have long term strategy when teams are evenly matched. Mechanics and positioning looks really strong still. Decisions less so.
- nindalf 8y ago
  It was frustrating to see it do so many things well but make strange decisions otherwise - poor warding. Some wards were simply wasted. (Wards are small, invisible, immovable units that grant vision) - using powerful long cool down spells to earn gold instead of keeping it in reserve for fights - not recognising that one of the lanes needed to be pushed out. Eventually this bit them in the ass. - using buybacks where none were required
  - PeCaN 8y ago
    The warding was interesting. It had 3 wards basically stacked on top of each other near the Roshan pit at one point. On the one hand, it apparently learned to ward areas that were of high strategic importance. On the other hand… it had 3 wards stacked on top of each other.
  - 8y ago
greenmountin 8y ago
Interesting that the draft was predetermined (unlike the previous exhibition, which was live), allowing OpenAI to train ahead of time on a restricted set of matches. I wonder how long that was?
- wnevets 8y ago
  Since Saturday they said.
tokipin 8y ago
The bots were using their ultimates pretty liberally. Maybe their "bot meta" is very group-intensive, so if they see one hero there's a good chance there are other heroes nearby? Other possible reasons: Opportunity cost of not using ultimates, getting a single kill late game can mean victory, bots penalized for games going later or their games just not running long in general?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
  I think it’s becoming clear that the network is overfitting to team fights (and other small duration action). OpenAI use of cooldowns in the last 20 minutes was inexcusable. It became obvious OpenAI had no working strategy.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Is OpenAI's expected win chance available anywhere? Only the bot reaction time against initiations was keeping them in the game for the last 20 minutes, so it might have been the desperate flailing typical of bots when they are losing.
    - dx87 8y ago
      The bots are actually calculating their expected win chance continuously throughout the match, even while the heroes are still being picked. During the OpenAI Five benchmark, the AI estimated its win chance at over 90 percent when it got to pick its own heroes, but estimated a mid 20% chance of victory when it was deliberately given bad heroes.
Kagerjay 8y ago
DoTA has come such a long way from being just a warcraft 3 mod. All those random pub matches I used to play with w33, analyzing all the patchnotes and .w3g replays before youtube was a thing, to shitty garena pubmatches, to a full fledge esports remake, to going to my first Dota TI2 international 2 years back, and now AI is being thrown in the mix. I wonder what the future of DoTA will look like now
- captain_crabs 8y ago
  Yeah. Dota's the one game I've consistently played my entire life. Seeing it bloom and blossom from just this thing I knew & enjoyed into the whole primetime, then merging into broader tech...this is awesome! Crappy garena, banlists, vs 5 ai in wc3 when no internet... :')
- emilsedgh 8y ago
  But the popularity is a bit declining, isn't it?
  - nstart 8y ago
    Going to go off on a tangent here. Yes and no. By raw numbers it certainly is in a state of decline. But put in context, it may have been inevitable. It has everything going against it. DotA is a team game. It's incredibly complex. Not easy to pick up. Mastery requires 1000's of hours. And it's miserable to play at the start. The community is toxic. So random teams in a public match when you are new to the game compounds. Even if you aren't new, one way or another random teams can quite often be a frustrating experience that you just don't feel you have control over. Compunding even further is the fact that once you start a game you are locked in for 35-55+ minutes. That can be 35 painful minutes of feeling crap. Compare that to rising battle Royale games, and you get solo games you are allowed to be bad at and slowly get better in. And the time you spend in it is directly related to how much fun you have. And the games have a definite time cap. And the mechanics are simple. This holds true for a lot of other up and coming online casual multiplayer games. Point is, Dota is destined to be niche as a game that is played. What i would love to see is how the game can change externally to become more accessible to viewers. From client changes to community changes to changes in presenters, valve needs to step up to help people participate as spectators. The potential for the game to generate significant money lies in their pro circuit and it looks like valve is really stepping up their involvement here. Hopefully this continues. The (somewhat poor) parallel is something like rugby or squash. Fairly arcane rules. A lot of people don't remember when they last played the game. But they can still be heavily invested in watching.
abakus 8y ago
At the current state, openai five stands no chance against stronger teams (eg liquid lgd) of TI8.
adverbly 8y ago
Reaction time seems to be a lot more complicated than just 200ms flat. There were a lot of superhuman reactions that game which really made it difficult for humans to start a fight. At the same time though, increasing much more than 200ms might give a big advantage to humans in other situations. It will be interesting to see if they can find a better way to model it. All in all I am very impressed by the AI. So many complex strategies that it is employing(grouping for towers, lane swaps, etc...). But at the same time, it really does look at the moment like this is only close because the AI has vast advantages from mechanics and teamfighting.
- glalonde 8y ago
  The human would probably be able to blink/cancel if they were expecting it and therefore able to focus on a single thing prior to an event. The bot can focus on everything simultaneously and doesn't really need to expect anything. It gets a signal, it responds within 200ms, no problem. You could program that analytically. So I would say the superhuman-ness isn't in the number of actions taken, or in the response delay, but in the massive attention bandwidth. I believe they've attempted to even the playing field in the first two, which are easily quantifiable, but I don't know about the latter.
  - infogulch 8y ago
    "attention bandwidth" is a great term that really solidifies my fuzzy thoughts on how to characterize the bots, thank you!
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    To be fair, that's a little like saying Deep Blue had an advantage because it could try out thousands of possible plays simultaneously. That's true, but what makes humans good at Chess for example is that we have a really good "intuition" at which moves are good, and therefore we can prune non-promising branches in the decision tree better. Similarly here, the AI can definitely do a lot more things at once, but each individual thing they do isn't very smart. For example, they waste money on useless wards or waste time sitting in front of Roshan. We can of course keep pushing the goal post, but I think if the AI can win with the given constraints, it's still a huge accomplishment. Even more importantly though, it would be interesting to see if the AI is able to come up with new strategies and techniques that weren't known before.
tachikomagenius 8y ago
for a bot, they sure are doing pretty well versus the top 5% of the skilled dota players, assuming that only the top players around the world can enter the main international event.
- scns 8y ago
  Top 1% or less, sorry for being pedantic
- unrealhoang 8y ago
  It’s 0.05%. But also the game OpenAI plays is very limited. It’s a very small game compare to the real Dota. They just got rid of a small limitation of having 5 invulnerable couriers and already being punished hard (since their push timing being delayed). And Dota is much more complicated than just team fighting and death ball.
jlebar 8y ago
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE
yskchu 8y ago
Since maybe others will be looking for it too: the link above is for the live show - for the recording of the match (which is over) there's a link on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE
czardoz 8y ago
Is this five different OpenAI bots cooperating in the game, or a single engine controlling five boots?
- pure-awesome 8y ago
  It's five different instances: https://openai.com/five/#how-openai-five-works https://openai.com/five/#how-openai-five-works
- rishav_sharan 8y ago
  5 separate bots.
white-flame 8y ago
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that aims to promote and develop _FRIENDLY AI_ in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. I find it amusing & ironic that they're pursuing games of efficiently & strategically killing enemies as examples of their successful progress. ;-)
- hsrada 8y ago
  > I find it amusing & ironic that they're pursuing games of efficiently & strategically killing enemies as examples of their successful progress. ;-) Except that the amusement and irony would cease to exist once you have some idea of what's happening behind the scenes. The AI doesn't know it's "killing enemies". For it, it's just something that results in the increase of a numerical reward signal.
  - white-flame 8y ago
    Obviously. I understand the accomplishments and applicability of the tech. Stepping back a bit and simply looking at the context, though, it is an amusing contrast.
  - tree_of_item 8y ago
    Is that supposed to remove the amusement and irony? "We're creating friendly AI! Well, it thinks it's friendly, since to it, everything is just a numerical reward signal."
scns 8y ago
If you want better quality watch the viedo by dota 2 rapier
a_humean 8y ago
So three major differences between this and the last big match for OpenAI Five which explain the different result in favour of the Humans: 1) The Humans, Pain Gaming, is a professional team with players that regularly play and practice together and attend major tournaments. While they are the weakest team at this event and are arguably there only because of a regional qualifier system (they are from South America and the strongest team in an up and coming region), they are capable of taking games off some of the strongest teams due to their unpredictable and dynamic play. They are substantially better than the team of ex-pros and commentators that last played against the AI. 2) They removed an important limitation in the game, which was the 5 invincible couriers, and replaced it with a single killable courier that the five agents have to share (just like in a normal game of dota). The AI was able to use the single courier effectively, but did occasionally let it die a bit too often. What is important about this change is that it invalidated a strategy of the AI which was to continuously ferry consumable healing items to enable relentless aggression after gaining a slight edge in the early game. The AI adapted to this change by playing more cautiously in light of this standard resource/logistics constraint. It adds strength to the argument that as the OpenAI team introduces more complexity and resource constraints back into the game that the AI's weaknesses start to become more apparent and exploitable by better players. 3) The heroes composition was drafted in advance to be as even a match as possible, and a coin flip was made to decide which team got which draft. This is important as the version of the game is a subset of the game, and the humans evidently didn't understand the meta game in this weird subset during the last event. From the AI's perspective this was as even a draft as possible given the very small hero pool. In the last event the AI predicted 70-95% win confidence before the game even started due humans not understanding the drafting meta with a pool of 18/115 heroes and no bans. Still, really impressive performance by OpenAI as at least for the early game and some of the mid game it was a close game with lots of good plays by both sides. The fact that OpenAI can be comparable to a pro team in what is nearly a full game of dota is really impressive.
- ollerac 8y ago
  > 1) The Humans, Pain Gaming, [...] are the weakest team at this event and are arguably there only because of a regional qualifier system... I think it's totally disingenuous to call them the weakest team at the event. Two other teams performed worse in the group stage and one tied Pain's score, but still made it into the main event through sheer luck. Pain has won games against every single one of the strongest teams there. If you follow pro Dota, you know a lot of these games hinge on how a team happens to be performing on a certain day. Just this past May, Pain played in one of the top Dota tournaments of the year with 9 other teams who also happen to be at The International with them now -- and Pain came in 3rd place, ahead of Fnatic, OG, and Mineski.
rishav_sharan 8y ago
There are a lot of areas that OpenAI needs to improve on. the bots generally; 1. terrible at warding and dewarding 2. are terrible at using spell spam to farm. while their aoe spell usage is great in team fights, they suck at using spells to farm when they are alone. Gyro used his ult to farm a normal sized lane and still missed half the creeps. 3. don't understand bouncing spells like the lich nuke. In fact many times lich used that spell as a poking spell. 4. Bad at non-nuky/long running ultimates. DP made really bad usage of her ult several times outside of team fights. 5. Bad at judging Roshan respawn. 6. bad at using ability runes. 7. Are bad at juking. They have the right idea to start the juke when the chasing enemy is on a high ground ramp, but they can't time the highground fog jukes properly. 8. not good at prioritizing specific heroes in team fights (cores over supports, if both look equally chasable) 9. terrible at dealing with split pushes. They prioritize defending their towers over everything. Also bad at split pushing, in general. 10. bad at properly utilizing buybacks. If some heroes buyback during the defense, it is expected that the remaining heroes should ensure that the enemies can't escape, otherwise buybacks would be pretty useless. 11. when they are behind, they simply don't have any coherent way of catching up other than taking huge team fights. Which the enemy team will deny the AI, if they are smart. For now winning lanes and having overwhelming team fighting abilities is the only meta that the AI seems to be doing.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Yeah but it's already sufficient to beat the cram at anything under 3k mmr. It's quite remarquable as most players are in this loW tier.
  - aeosynth 8y ago
    They can beat the cram out of 6-7k players (99.95th percentile), beating Team Human - https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark-results/ https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark-results/
- jpatokal 8y ago
  You may be missing the point here: it's AI, so it doesn't "think" in terms of strategies or tactics like you do, it just runs countless simulations, figures out what works in those, and then blindly applies that. So if the human opponents do things it has not been trained to cope with, they'll have a significant edge. Incidentally, this is pretty much what Kasparov did when playing Deep Blue, with some success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparo... Aside: As a non-Dota-playing HNer, the only one of those points I found comprehensible was #11. Gaming jargon can be pretty impenetrable to the uninitiated...
AmitJS 8y ago
But this bot can defeat a bunch of heralds and guardian players.
branevoid 8y ago
Can the bots learn from the previously played international matches?

209 points by nerform 8y ago

sh4z 8y ago

Updated the ruleset with regular couriers! Will be a lot different from the earlier matches. I'm guessing humans can win if they find "cheese" plays that the bot has not found during it's practice.

jsheard 8y ago

For context: OpenAI is playing against a professional team this time, unlike the event a few weeks ago where the humans were skilled but not active pros or used to playing together. This team isn't the strongest (they placed 17-18th during this TI) but OpenAI will play again tomorrow and the day after, presumably against progressively better teams.

roenxi 8y ago
> his team isn't the strongest (they placed 17-18th during this TI) Oh, is that all :P. Assuming a 2x buffer for players who are good but not competitive, there are maybe 200 humans in the world who are better at DotA. If mastery is 1 in 10,000, these people are masters.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
  Many believe that it’s an exponential curve so there’s a substantial difference between the first and twentieth place teams.
  - whymauri 8y ago
    Looking historically at team ELO and how squads have gone on 27-series win streaks, this is probably right. Though I think the gap between "low-tier" TI teams and TI winners is getting much tighter. Group B at TI8 was so close the difference between upper-bracket and lower-bracket was 1 game for most of the teams.
    - noxvilleza 8y ago
      *Elo, not ELO :)
      - whymauri 8y ago
        lol, good catch. Gotta give Arpad his credit :)
  - PeCaN 8y ago
    Even if this is true, pain is one of the unpredictable teams that can take a game off anyone. They went 3-1 against Liquid at the Birmingham Major. Actually, "weaker" (top 20) teams regularly do take games off better teams so I don't think there's much evidence for an exponential skill increase between teams.
- nindalf 8y ago
  No, there are way more than 200 players better than Pain, all due respect to them. That’s clear by looking at leaderboards. But team dynamics and synergy in this game matter so much that they are definitely in the top 20 of teams regardless of their individual skill. Seeing OpenAI do so well against this team impressed the hell out of me.
  - Strom 8y ago
    A really big factor making up your ranking on the leaderboard is your ability to play in a chaotic game where your team and yourself aren't on the same page. Just taking the top players from the leaderboard (who aren't already on a top team) and putting them together makes up a team that is good enough to win against other similar random teams (hence their high rank) but can't win against actual teams, which is evidenced all the time in the open qualifers where actual teams that consist of lower ranked players beat them. TI open qualifer / regional qualifer / actual event placements are way better indicators on how good a team is than pub leaderboards.
  - throw_away_777 8y ago
    The way TI is structured they invite one team from South America. So Pain is likely not in top 20, but still a very good team.
    - nindalf 8y ago
      I know how TI is structured, but I’m confident they’re top 20 anyway. Which team not at TI is better, do you think? Complexity? Navi? I don’t think so.
sambroner 8y ago
Seems like playing one of the best 200 players in the world is a reasonable proxy for a top tier player. I'm unfamiliar with DOTA rules, but does anyone know if there are any limitations on the openAI team? e.g. Things like keystrokes per minute, scroll speed, etc
- jsheard 8y ago
  During the last OpenAI showmatch the bots had an artificial 200ms reaction time imposed on them, I assume it's the same here but I'm not sure.
  - sambroner 8y ago
    Thanks.
  - larkeith 8y ago
    I don't believe this is the case, as OpenAI was able to hex (an immediate disable) Earthshaker before he got off Echoslam (a spell with no cast delay except the time to click the key).
    - def_true_false 8y ago
      The ES player didn't queue his abilities so there was delay between blinking and casting echo. Someone counted the frames and it was well over the 200ms minimum.
      - el_devo 8y ago
        Here is a post from the Dota 2 subreddit discussing the timing with proof that OpenAI's reaction was over the 200ms minimum: https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/94vdpm/openai_hex_was_within_the_200ms_response_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/94vdpm/openai_hex_wa...
        Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
nopinsight 8y ago
In general, the differences among a top echelon of human expertise are vastly smaller than those between humans and other kinds of agents, animals or AIs. We all share similar cognitive architecture for handling complex domains after all. Once OpenAI Five defeat 3-4 pro teams convincingly, it could be presumed from the observation above that they will defeat any other top teams within a year at most, if sufficient resources are used for improving the AI. An exception is when a fundamental hidden weakness is found in the AI. Another confounding factor is major rule changes where the game essentially becomes a different one.
- chibg10 8y ago
  > Once OpenAI Five defeat 3-4 pro teams convincingly, it could be presumed from the observation above that they will defeat any other top teams within a year at most, if sufficient resources are used for improving the AI. An exception is when a fundamental hidden weakness is found in the AI. Not sure how you intended this, but the hero pool constraint is actually an enormous advantage for the AI. The current hero pool isn't, by any means, random. I don't know OpenAI selected it, but it's highly conducive to OpenAI Five's strengths--deathballing, mechanics, teamfight coordination, etc. It lacks essentially all of the heroes that humans would normally pick to counter that strategy. Playing on an unrestricted hero set would test OpenAI Five in entirely different ways than playing on the current hero pool would. I would not be comfortable betting on your statement at all.
  - noxvilleza 8y ago
    > The current hero pool isn't, by any means, random. Some of the restrictions they've discussed - like initially they couldn't handle with illusions, summons or invisibility at all. They obviously dropped the invis restriction. My feeling is that the AI just learned that of the given pool, 'deathball' was the best (and specific heroes like Gyrocopter/Sniper were the most effective carries).
  - ajuc 8y ago
    > I don't know OpenAI selected it, but it's highly conducive to OpenAI Five's strengths--deathballing, mechanics, teamfight coordination, etc. It lacks essentially all of the heroes that humans would normally pick to counter that strategy. Isn't it the other way around - openai adjusted to the hero pool to come up with its' strategy, because it was trained on this hero pool. If hero pool had only late-game melee carries - I assume openai would come up with a strategy that works with that.

ggregoire 8y ago

Wait… the big news here is steam.tv. I heard the rumors but didn't know it was up?! (it seems to work only for their own event at this time tho.)

kawsper 8y ago
They announced it a couple of days ago: http://blog.dota2.com/2018/08/the-main-event-with-new-steam-broadcasting/ http://blog.dota2.com/2018/08/the-main-event-with-new-steam-... It still have limitations and bugs, yesterday it just wouldn't load for me, but it works now, and you are unable to watch yesterdays content.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  The UI is very wonky, definitely looks like it was rushed last minute to release for TI. That "Watch with friends" button is pretty messed up if you're logged in. Also if you're logged in and "close" the stream tab, I don't see any way to get back to it. Definitely a work in progress.
Kagerjay 8y ago
I didn't even look at the URL, I assumed this was a twitch link. Makes sense they would showcase it on their flagship game though
symlinkk 8y ago
Looks like it's built with React
dang 8y ago
A mod changed the URL from https://steam.tv/dota2/ https://steam.tv/dota2/ after this comment was posted, presumably because the live stream was over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824373).

sama 8y ago

We are playing with regular couriers for the first time! And against a pro team.

hamhamed 8y ago
Pain isn't the toughest of opponents at TI. Will they be playing vs a team that is currently still alive in the bracket? So far it seems Pain is kind of controlling the game at least much better vs the caster team (99th percentile)
- noxvilleza 8y ago
  They're still the ~19th best team in the world.
  - rajahafify 8y ago
    No. TI is not a meritocracy. Pain came from the weakest region in the world. Without the SA slot, they wouldn't even be in TI.
    - xfer 8y ago
      And you know that, how? Have you seen them fight against other region teams that failed to qualify?
      - andreime 8y ago
        Maybe, like me, he follows the pro scene. People complain a lot that Europe is stacked (meaning stronger teams) compared to regions like NA, and they get the same amount of slots a TI. South America is probably the weakest region. I think a lot of people following the competitive scene would agree with what he was saying - that Pain is not top 20 in the world.
        xfer 8y ago
        I follow the pro scene too, nobody sensible would say they are not top 20, can you name a team that deserved to be in TI other than pain here from any region? > People complain a lot that Europe is stacked (meaning stronger teams) compared to regions like NA Really? Go ahead and name an EU team that is not playing in TI that should be here. EU is top heavy and they get to TI easily, other than that not much. SA is weaker region for sure, that's why they have 1 team from their region and they deserve to be there.

sama 8y ago

rigged IMO

ISL 8y ago
Citation needed?
- icelancer 8y ago
  Look at the poster name.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  Sam Altman is a jokester.
hamhamed 8y ago
well, there's constantly empty chairs on the face cam whenever it's on the OpenAI hero, so something must be fishy ;)

bxio 8y ago

This time, OpenAI is playing a normal game without restrictions. Team Human got thoroughly trashed last time vs OpenAI in a game with hero restrictions. Go OpenAI! I For One welcome our new robot overlords.

Analemma_ 8y ago
Not quite a normal game with no restrictions because it's a pre-selected hero pick from a limited pool instead of a full draft, but it's still very cool. Interesting that OpenAI seems to prefer deathballing, but it makes sense: its main advantage over humans is probably tactical and in teamfights, and 5-man maximizes your options. The human strategy should probably be to split push, but one of the commentators (who is also a pro who played against OpenAI earlier) says that is very difficult because OpenAI can apply pressure everywhere.
- balls187 8y ago
  I recall reading somewhere that the real advantage AI had was in it's ability to come up with bizarre strategies that confuse human opponents.
  - ionforce 8y ago
    I'm skeptical that you read this somewhere. AI doesn't "come up" with strategies. It's likely something that's been discovered in training and then mechanically repeated. But it doesn't "come up" with strategies out of nowhere.
    - tree_of_item 8y ago
      Why doesn't it come up with strategies? The program is doing a massive search over an action space, of course it will find things there.
      - balls187 8y ago
        It's a dumb semantics argument about using the phrase "come up."

21 8y ago

How can I tell looking at the screen who is winning? Is there a score somewhere? Maybe the left side sliders?

jdoliner 8y ago
The best things to look at are the gold difference (below the top bar) and the towers remaining (on either side of the top bar). But neither fully captures who's winning. Dota is remarkable for how possible comebacks are, so it's often hard to say with certainty who's winning at a certain moment.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
yelnatz 8y ago
In general its the number of towers they've destroyed + number of kills. Not always a great indicator but you can tell who's behind.
minimaxir 8y ago
A rule of thumb for determining who is winning is the delta net worth: the money icon that appears under the kill counter at the top for the team who's ahead. (as of posting, OpenAI is ahead)
Kagerjay 8y ago
Its not always exactly obvious. But generally speaking, number of kills + towers destroyed is always a good indicator. Another good indicator is overall networth, the team winning usually has 3 out of their 5 players at the top 5 ranks in money value. One thing you can see is which team is constantly defending and which is constantly attacking. That's a pretty good indicator too. No guarantees though, games have been known to flop and be unpredictable, mostly due to respawn timers / buybacks lategame. Late game is super critical on who gets first kill generally
noxvilleza 8y ago
Net Worth Difference is the best single indicator, but there are additional factors like tower difference, item purchasing decisions, hero composition, hero aliveness & buyback status, aegis, etc. Some specific heroes also wildly differ from the norm for each one of these factors. The game is very complex :()

alexedw 8y ago

Looks like OpenAI just lost Match #1.

jjcm 8y ago

Overall a very good game. Definitely smart on PAIN gaming's part to delay the game and wait until the mid game (where OpenAI traditionally excels the most) is over in order to rely on their stronger carry. I think the lack of 5 couriers really showed where OpenAI had a crutch the last game it played. Excited to see the improvements as this goes on, and I suspect that next year we'll see the OpenAI team beat the #1 ranked human team.

nindalf 8y ago
Loved the strategy used by Pain. They recognised that fighting OpenAI wasn’t working so they actively avoided fights. They recognised strategic shortcomings, like the AI’s reluctance to pressure lanes and exploited it. What disappointed me a bit is that the AI didn’t make a concerted effort to win the game when it was strongest.
- chibg10 8y ago
  This type of playstyle adjustment by Pain is just standard Dota strategy tbh. When your team is losing teamfights, you avoid teamfights unless you know you have an imminent advantage (terrain, towers, initiation, numbers, etc.). A big part of avoiding teamfights is splitting up and putting pressure on lanes so that the other team has to split up to defend their towers. If they are split up and defending their towers, they can't group up and force fights at objectives (Roshan, towers, w/e) that your team would have to group up to defend. Not to take anything away from Pain--just making it to TI is enough to prove that they're excellent Dota players.

Analemma_ 8y ago

Hooray, humans not obsolete quite yet! Very good play from OpenAI though, even though it ultimately lost. It looked very scary how fast it could switch between dominating 5-man teamfights to splitting up and ganking or pushing down towers.

symlinkk 8y ago

Their reaction time seemed way too fast. It was entertaining to watch though.

noxvilleza 8y ago
It's actually internationally delayed reactions to make it more fair (200ms of delay added).
- mbbutler 8y ago
  That's what OpenAI claims, but there have been too many insta-hex/euls moments for me to believe that. Players are shift-queing blink+AoE spells and getting hexed in between the two abilities. That's way faster than a 200 ms reaction time. I think OpenAI might have a bug with how they're adding reaction time.
  - foobaw 8y ago
    Someone did an analysis on this because it seemed like insta hex the last time they played, but they were all pre-queued and the 200ms turned out to be accurate.
    - tgb 8y ago
      Yeah my guess is that perfect timing-awareness and 200ms reaction time looks a lot like 0ms reaction time. Just start the action 200ms earlier - that'll work in enough cases that you'll look like you have perfect timing.
- makoz 8y ago
  Watching the match there seemed to be a crazy amount of instant Euls and what not. I doubt a player is about to react to a blink initiation and click Euls/Hex in the same amount of time. It'd be a lot more fair for them to calibrate against the reaction time of pro-players across the same scenarios. (I doubt pros can hit 200ms consistently)

Leary 8y ago

Outfought the humans in teamfights, other than that not sure how much long term strategic thought was shown.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
OpenAI looked bad in the mid-game and non-competitive in the late-game. The team fight stuff is frustrating since it’s just learning perfect rotations where computers should obviously excel. Their continuing use of cool downs on creeps in the late game was baffling.
NegatioN 8y ago
Totally agree. I was very hopeful after seeing the benchmark match, but openai definitely looked a lot more naked today. Long term (5-10 mins) looked really weak when it really mattered. It just wanted toget team fights and capitalize on it to take down objectives later. I think I saw somewhere that they are training to consider a time frame of a minute or so, so it makes sense. But it's also slightly disappointing since these games have long term strategy when teams are evenly matched. Mechanics and positioning looks really strong still. Decisions less so.
nindalf 8y ago
It was frustrating to see it do so many things well but make strange decisions otherwise - poor warding. Some wards were simply wasted. (Wards are small, invisible, immovable units that grant vision) - using powerful long cool down spells to earn gold instead of keeping it in reserve for fights - not recognising that one of the lanes needed to be pushed out. Eventually this bit them in the ass. - using buybacks where none were required
- PeCaN 8y ago
  The warding was interesting. It had 3 wards basically stacked on top of each other near the Roshan pit at one point. On the one hand, it apparently learned to ward areas that were of high strategic importance. On the other hand… it had 3 wards stacked on top of each other.
- 8y ago

greenmountin 8y ago

Interesting that the draft was predetermined (unlike the previous exhibition, which was live), allowing OpenAI to train ahead of time on a restricted set of matches. I wonder how long that was?

wnevets 8y ago
Since Saturday they said.

tokipin 8y ago

The bots were using their ultimates pretty liberally. Maybe their "bot meta" is very group-intensive, so if they see one hero there's a good chance there are other heroes nearby? Other possible reasons: Opportunity cost of not using ultimates, getting a single kill late game can mean victory, bots penalized for games going later or their games just not running long in general?

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
I think it’s becoming clear that the network is overfitting to team fights (and other small duration action). OpenAI use of cooldowns in the last 20 minutes was inexcusable. It became obvious OpenAI had no working strategy.
- roenxi 8y ago
  Is OpenAI's expected win chance available anywhere? Only the bot reaction time against initiations was keeping them in the game for the last 20 minutes, so it might have been the desperate flailing typical of bots when they are losing.
  - dx87 8y ago
    The bots are actually calculating their expected win chance continuously throughout the match, even while the heroes are still being picked. During the OpenAI Five benchmark, the AI estimated its win chance at over 90 percent when it got to pick its own heroes, but estimated a mid 20% chance of victory when it was deliberately given bad heroes.

Kagerjay 8y ago

DoTA has come such a long way from being just a warcraft 3 mod. All those random pub matches I used to play with w33, analyzing all the patchnotes and .w3g replays before youtube was a thing, to shitty garena pubmatches, to a full fledge esports remake, to going to my first Dota TI2 international 2 years back, and now AI is being thrown in the mix. I wonder what the future of DoTA will look like now

captain_crabs 8y ago
Yeah. Dota's the one game I've consistently played my entire life. Seeing it bloom and blossom from just this thing I knew & enjoyed into the whole primetime, then merging into broader tech...this is awesome! Crappy garena, banlists, vs 5 ai in wc3 when no internet... :')
emilsedgh 8y ago
But the popularity is a bit declining, isn't it?
- nstart 8y ago
  Going to go off on a tangent here. Yes and no. By raw numbers it certainly is in a state of decline. But put in context, it may have been inevitable. It has everything going against it. DotA is a team game. It's incredibly complex. Not easy to pick up. Mastery requires 1000's of hours. And it's miserable to play at the start. The community is toxic. So random teams in a public match when you are new to the game compounds. Even if you aren't new, one way or another random teams can quite often be a frustrating experience that you just don't feel you have control over. Compunding even further is the fact that once you start a game you are locked in for 35-55+ minutes. That can be 35 painful minutes of feeling crap. Compare that to rising battle Royale games, and you get solo games you are allowed to be bad at and slowly get better in. And the time you spend in it is directly related to how much fun you have. And the games have a definite time cap. And the mechanics are simple. This holds true for a lot of other up and coming online casual multiplayer games. Point is, Dota is destined to be niche as a game that is played. What i would love to see is how the game can change externally to become more accessible to viewers. From client changes to community changes to changes in presenters, valve needs to step up to help people participate as spectators. The potential for the game to generate significant money lies in their pro circuit and it looks like valve is really stepping up their involvement here. Hopefully this continues. The (somewhat poor) parallel is something like rugby or squash. Fairly arcane rules. A lot of people don't remember when they last played the game. But they can still be heavily invested in watching.

abakus 8y ago

At the current state, openai five stands no chance against stronger teams (eg liquid lgd) of TI8.

adverbly 8y ago

Reaction time seems to be a lot more complicated than just 200ms flat. There were a lot of superhuman reactions that game which really made it difficult for humans to start a fight. At the same time though, increasing much more than 200ms might give a big advantage to humans in other situations. It will be interesting to see if they can find a better way to model it. All in all I am very impressed by the AI. So many complex strategies that it is employing(grouping for towers, lane swaps, etc...). But at the same time, it really does look at the moment like this is only close because the AI has vast advantages from mechanics and teamfighting.

glalonde 8y ago
The human would probably be able to blink/cancel if they were expecting it and therefore able to focus on a single thing prior to an event. The bot can focus on everything simultaneously and doesn't really need to expect anything. It gets a signal, it responds within 200ms, no problem. You could program that analytically. So I would say the superhuman-ness isn't in the number of actions taken, or in the response delay, but in the massive attention bandwidth. I believe they've attempted to even the playing field in the first two, which are easily quantifiable, but I don't know about the latter.
- infogulch 8y ago
  "attention bandwidth" is a great term that really solidifies my fuzzy thoughts on how to characterize the bots, thank you!
- ehsankia 8y ago
  To be fair, that's a little like saying Deep Blue had an advantage because it could try out thousands of possible plays simultaneously. That's true, but what makes humans good at Chess for example is that we have a really good "intuition" at which moves are good, and therefore we can prune non-promising branches in the decision tree better. Similarly here, the AI can definitely do a lot more things at once, but each individual thing they do isn't very smart. For example, they waste money on useless wards or waste time sitting in front of Roshan. We can of course keep pushing the goal post, but I think if the AI can win with the given constraints, it's still a huge accomplishment. Even more importantly though, it would be interesting to see if the AI is able to come up with new strategies and techniques that weren't known before.

tachikomagenius 8y ago

for a bot, they sure are doing pretty well versus the top 5% of the skilled dota players, assuming that only the top players around the world can enter the main international event.

scns 8y ago
Top 1% or less, sorry for being pedantic
unrealhoang 8y ago
It’s 0.05%. But also the game OpenAI plays is very limited. It’s a very small game compare to the real Dota. They just got rid of a small limitation of having 5 invulnerable couriers and already being punished hard (since their push timing being delayed). And Dota is much more complicated than just team fighting and death ball.

jlebar 8y ago

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE

yskchu 8y ago

Since maybe others will be looking for it too: the link above is for the live show - for the recording of the match (which is over) there's a link on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EQCE9LRXE

czardoz 8y ago

Is this five different OpenAI bots cooperating in the game, or a single engine controlling five boots?

pure-awesome 8y ago
It's five different instances: https://openai.com/five/#how-openai-five-works https://openai.com/five/#how-openai-five-works
rishav_sharan 8y ago
5 separate bots.

white-flame 8y ago

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that aims to promote and develop _FRIENDLY AI_ in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. I find it amusing & ironic that they're pursuing games of efficiently & strategically killing enemies as examples of their successful progress. ;-)

hsrada 8y ago
> I find it amusing & ironic that they're pursuing games of efficiently & strategically killing enemies as examples of their successful progress. ;-) Except that the amusement and irony would cease to exist once you have some idea of what's happening behind the scenes. The AI doesn't know it's "killing enemies". For it, it's just something that results in the increase of a numerical reward signal.
- white-flame 8y ago
  Obviously. I understand the accomplishments and applicability of the tech. Stepping back a bit and simply looking at the context, though, it is an amusing contrast.
- tree_of_item 8y ago
  Is that supposed to remove the amusement and irony? "We're creating friendly AI! Well, it thinks it's friendly, since to it, everything is just a numerical reward signal."

scns 8y ago

If you want better quality watch the viedo by dota 2 rapier

a_humean 8y ago

So three major differences between this and the last big match for OpenAI Five which explain the different result in favour of the Humans: 1) The Humans, Pain Gaming, is a professional team with players that regularly play and practice together and attend major tournaments. While they are the weakest team at this event and are arguably there only because of a regional qualifier system (they are from South America and the strongest team in an up and coming region), they are capable of taking games off some of the strongest teams due to their unpredictable and dynamic play. They are substantially better than the team of ex-pros and commentators that last played against the AI. 2) They removed an important limitation in the game, which was the 5 invincible couriers, and replaced it with a single killable courier that the five agents have to share (just like in a normal game of dota). The AI was able to use the single courier effectively, but did occasionally let it die a bit too often. What is important about this change is that it invalidated a strategy of the AI which was to continuously ferry consumable healing items to enable relentless aggression after gaining a slight edge in the early game. The AI adapted to this change by playing more cautiously in light of this standard resource/logistics constraint. It adds strength to the argument that as the OpenAI team introduces more complexity and resource constraints back into the game that the AI's weaknesses start to become more apparent and exploitable by better players. 3) The heroes composition was drafted in advance to be as even a match as possible, and a coin flip was made to decide which team got which draft. This is important as the version of the game is a subset of the game, and the humans evidently didn't understand the meta game in this weird subset during the last event. From the AI's perspective this was as even a draft as possible given the very small hero pool. In the last event the AI predicted 70-95% win confidence before the game even started due humans not understanding the drafting meta with a pool of 18/115 heroes and no bans. Still, really impressive performance by OpenAI as at least for the early game and some of the mid game it was a close game with lots of good plays by both sides. The fact that OpenAI can be comparable to a pro team in what is nearly a full game of dota is really impressive.

ollerac 8y ago
> 1) The Humans, Pain Gaming, [...] are the weakest team at this event and are arguably there only because of a regional qualifier system... I think it's totally disingenuous to call them the weakest team at the event. Two other teams performed worse in the group stage and one tied Pain's score, but still made it into the main event through sheer luck. Pain has won games against every single one of the strongest teams there. If you follow pro Dota, you know a lot of these games hinge on how a team happens to be performing on a certain day. Just this past May, Pain played in one of the top Dota tournaments of the year with 9 other teams who also happen to be at The International with them now -- and Pain came in 3rd place, ahead of Fnatic, OG, and Mineski.

rishav_sharan 8y ago

There are a lot of areas that OpenAI needs to improve on. the bots generally; 1. terrible at warding and dewarding 2. are terrible at using spell spam to farm. while their aoe spell usage is great in team fights, they suck at using spells to farm when they are alone. Gyro used his ult to farm a normal sized lane and still missed half the creeps. 3. don't understand bouncing spells like the lich nuke. In fact many times lich used that spell as a poking spell. 4. Bad at non-nuky/long running ultimates. DP made really bad usage of her ult several times outside of team fights. 5. Bad at judging Roshan respawn. 6. bad at using ability runes. 7. Are bad at juking. They have the right idea to start the juke when the chasing enemy is on a high ground ramp, but they can't time the highground fog jukes properly. 8. not good at prioritizing specific heroes in team fights (cores over supports, if both look equally chasable) 9. terrible at dealing with split pushes. They prioritize defending their towers over everything. Also bad at split pushing, in general. 10. bad at properly utilizing buybacks. If some heroes buyback during the defense, it is expected that the remaining heroes should ensure that the enemies can't escape, otherwise buybacks would be pretty useless. 11. when they are behind, they simply don't have any coherent way of catching up other than taking huge team fights. Which the enemy team will deny the AI, if they are smart. For now winning lanes and having overwhelming team fighting abilities is the only meta that the AI seems to be doing.

sametmax 8y ago
Yeah but it's already sufficient to beat the cram at anything under 3k mmr. It's quite remarquable as most players are in this loW tier.
- aeosynth 8y ago
  They can beat the cram out of 6-7k players (99.95th percentile), beating Team Human - https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark-results/ https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark-results/
jpatokal 8y ago
You may be missing the point here: it's AI, so it doesn't "think" in terms of strategies or tactics like you do, it just runs countless simulations, figures out what works in those, and then blindly applies that. So if the human opponents do things it has not been trained to cope with, they'll have a significant edge. Incidentally, this is pretty much what Kasparov did when playing Deep Blue, with some success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparo... Aside: As a non-Dota-playing HNer, the only one of those points I found comprehensible was #11. Gaming jargon can be pretty impenetrable to the uninitiated...

AmitJS 8y ago

But this bot can defeat a bunch of heralds and guardian players.

branevoid 8y ago

Can the bots learn from the previously played international matches?