With all due respect, the professionals who have played against the bot have been pretty impressed with previous iteration. The major roadblocks at TI were probably that the bot did not efficiently learn courier mechanics and that the draft was not done by the bot.
Multiple invincible couriers makes the game very similar to the 1v1 show match last year where the strategy of just out-live the opponent wins. The casters have never played that version of the game before, and wouldn't know to use that strategy.
The more interesting part was, the bots attempted to use that very same strategy in the single-vulnerable normal version of the game which was drastically less effective; you could only ferry out consumables at 1/5th the rate as before and the courier could be killed so it wasn't a riskless strategy like it was before.
I 100% disagree that the invincible couriers make the game "very similar" to the 1v1. There's many more layers of engineering that went into that version. The bots had to learn drafting, cooperation, highground pushing, Roshan, vision, invisibility, etc.
I'm amazed you can trivialize all this as a 'joke'.
Of the list of skills you mentioned that the bots "learned", on the main stage, the draft was provided by humans, and from a significantly limited set, the bots never pressured highground, checked for Roshan when it was impossible for it to be up, had nonsensical placement of vision (placed vision where vision already existed), continuously invested in anti-invisibility consumables even when the opposition team had no invisibility.
If the mechanical skills were toned down to human levels, I don't think the latest iteration of the bot on the latest ruleset can even compete with the average human player, much less the pros.
In my opinion, what i see is a very good player who knows how to chain stun precisely without any strategic depth. If you claim to have built an AI system, which you ultimately want it to evolve to AGI, you at least expect some sort of strategic decision making at the macro level. Though since it has almost perfect micro, it can easily outweight the most of teams. So yeah, with that expectation I see this as a joke, too.
P.S. The model is trained with 128k cpus and 256 gpu. It is able to play 180 years worth of game in a day. Think about it.
It's the first line of the article: https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/
>Our team of five neural networks,
They use a hyperparameter called team spirit to cooperate. I don't think the goal of this is AGI at all, so I don't see why people are making that leap. But sure, for the geniuses of HN this must clearly be trivial.
I think they should have trained with 1 courier right from the beginning.
If I had to guess, they started out with the 5-courier setup because otherwise the bots would end up fighting over the courier -- just like a typical pub team. :)
The way I would guess this played out was that OpenAI tried multiple variants of the game, and this version ended up being good enough to beat human players. Of course, they later learnt that the bots were winning not because they were good, but the variant was imbalanced and its strategies unfamiliar to humans.
No. We had implemented scripted courier logic for 1v1, and when switching to 5v5 the easiest starting point was to run five copies of that logic. (Dota's Turbo mode also has five invulnerable couriers.) In June, we had more important restrictions to remove — such as wards & Roshan; you personally were focused on the particular heroes we'd chosen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17392455. The couriers only become our most important restriction in August.
Deathball strategy has been a thing since even before 2014...
You have argued yourself into a corner. It happens.
The games they won weren't actual dota games - they were a simplified subset of dota that overweights teamfights and mechanical skill - exactly the subset that we'd expect an AI to be best at.
A human has ~200ms simple reaction time, then begins to move their fingers. Which then moves a mouse to target an area, which then requires hotkeys to be pushed. etc. etc.
Its still definitely a mechanical advantage, and it seems evident in the gameplay videos. The bots still seem "super-human" in their aim and some of the timing of spells.
What was interesting to me was that since the bots trained against themselves, they discarded this combo as being ineffective - the result being that they did not use this combo even against vulnerable human players.
This means that Dota 2 was balanced around the expectation that human's best reaction would be at least 400ms, because I've never seen Axe's blink calls being dodged unless the player had vision of Axe before the blink and thus was expecting it.
Only at human speeds.
Once you break the 10,000 APM barrier however, Zerglings start to dodge-tanks and other shenanigans begin to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
Micro has a general advantage of growing at a rate of N^2. That is, 10 Zealots, with perfect micro, can perform roughly as well as 100 Zealots with the worst micro possible.
Ex: 100 Zealots come in one-at-a-time vs the 10-zealots in an inverted-V shape. The 10-zealots will defeat roughly 100.
The bigger and more complicated the board gets, the more and more micro becomes favored.
It's argued that drafting is one of the major components of competitive play and more often than not, draft advantage wins games, but that wasn't a factor in this match.
The bots excelled at things you expected computers to be good at, consistently quick reactions/mechanical skill and coordinated skirmishes. The bots fell flat on strategy, optimal resource usage (short and long term), and most importantly, coordinated decision-making.
So as an result, they dominated the early game which has always been heavily mechanics favored and absolutely fell apart mid/late-game when decision-making mattered (and often made decisions that benefited early game economy at the cost of mid/late game).
Computers being good at mechanics is not an impressive result.