Dota is a bit deceptive like that; it is secretly a slow and deliberate game. IMO most of the deaths occur 2-5 seconds before the action begins when a hero gets out of position.

There was a moment in game 1 that was the exception proving the rule for me. The bot playing lion successfully disabled the human initiator on earthshaker at the end of the game. It looked like a superhuman reaction, but it was also a bit different from all the other fights of the game where it was usually the fundamental position being too far in the AIs favour - they had a gold advantage and had been developing a lead through the entire game by consistently trading deaths 1-0, 2-1 or 3-2 in engagements.

The potentially superhuman reaction took the game from "looks like bots are winning" to "humans resign now", but the vast bulk of the advantage was that the bots simply had a better understanding of which team enjoyed a superior position. I would not be surprised if higher bot reaction times (+100-300ms range) weren't all that impactful on the results.

It'll be really interesting when the courier distortion is removed and the AI has to play more defensively. Also, I suppose the actual, harder to articulate, complaint in the "reaction time" complaint is that the bot teammates have the capacity to chain abilities more accurately and have played so many hours together there is an advantage there that isn't 'fair'. It'll be a fun milestone when they can drop a single bot in a pub game where their teammates aren't all that coordinated.

If we had the compute luxury, I would love to see more AIs trained with faults like a longer reaction time or deficiencies to make them more human.

But yes, very exciting next stages when there are item builds, more heroes, and standard couriering.

I got the impression that they weren't particularly looking for a hero pool with a "deathball" meta, and the hero pool they selected had more to do with those being some of the simplest heroes to program at first. There is a lot of overlap between with the heroes they implemented and the set of introductory heroes that are recommended for new players who are playing their first games.

Regarding the insane reaction, I wonder if there is a natural way to handicap the AI to more human-like reaction times. Reaction time is not a good measure on its own because human reaction time can vary a lot depending on the level of surprise.

That said, my impression from watching the game was that the power of the AI had less to do with perfect reaction time and more to do with their "hive mind" coordination. If an enemy ever gets in the wrong position, they are immediately punished by a concerted attack. Humans have a harder time doing this because they need to communicate their intentions first. Sometimes each player will be focusing their attention on a different target.

Yep. This is clear to even a novice player to be a strategically chosen death ball/snowball configuration. Some of the least skilled players in Dota shoot for it but is undone by a broader range of unironically named 'intelligence' characters. It also becomes unwound in longer matches. Snowball/death ball cheese is easily bot-able and a human being would have a hard time winning vs it because you'd have to range and hit point calculations and act on it faster than a computer which a human being cannot.

> That said, my impression from watching the game was that the power of the AI had less to do with perfect reaction time and more to do with their "hive mind" coordination.

Yes, which is why they restricted character selection to favor it. There's no reason to call it a hive mind as it doesn't possess that. There's a global steering function presiding over 5 bots that need to act swiftly based on global dmg/etc. This is why they restricted the game to snowball cheese. A human can't beat this just as a human can't beat a TI-89. This is why, if you look closely, they absolutely destroy the bots when the team is separated and the human players aren't playing like greedy noobs diving towers.

> If an enemy ever gets in the wrong position, they are immediately punished by a concerted attack.

> bot : (10-9) =1 (I win) Strong AI right around the corner

Has there been any official information on how they came to choose their hero pool?

Not that I can recall.