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Comment by darrenkopp | Hacker News Reader

Really was quite interesting to watch (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/166172514?t=7h3m10s). Honestly, the bot played _extremely_ well, but I think the biggest advantage was how much faster it's reaction time was and it's movements were likely much more precise than a human is with a mouse.

I'm pretty interested in seeing their 5v5 results as well. It seems like that will have similar results as the bots can coordinate, but it's still a bit up in the air.

I'm really not sure how well a bot like this would do with 4 human teammates though. I would guess the bot would be a strong laner, but fairly weak overall due to it's inability to communicate, though if it's really good at learning how it's current teammates are playing as it goes, it may do alright.

I'm also pretty curious about the match limitations: no shrines (regen), no soul ring (mana regen at expense of some health), no raindrops (fixed amount of magic damage block)

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"No soul ring" has been a traditional rule for 1v1 competitions since at least TI3 [1]. It doesn't necessarily make sense for Shadow Fiend play, but it can make some other hero matchups, like Bane and Omniknight, drag out forever.

The shrine is inactive for the first five minutes of a normal game, so it's a non-factor in most 1v1 matchups.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1ka4bp/q_why_was_sou...

Looks like Bot was defeated at least 50 times - https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_w...

The method the reddit commenter (menohaxor) described to beat the openAI bot reminds me of the Go Deepmind Showmatch, Game 4, Move 78, where Lee Sedol made a highly unorthodox move. I'm reminded of this because in any serious 1v1 mid SF match, no one would try to win in the way by baiting enemy creeps into the jungle repeatedly to win by slowly chipping away at the T1 tower, it actually sounds like a joke on paper. So it seems that for the time being, in real-time games like dota and Starcraft, unorthodox plays and cheese strats could be very effective.

It would be a fantastic side project to teach bots to learn to speak "Dota". Learning to communicate efficiently is likely much easier as the vocabulary and intentions behind them are constrained.

I was not thinking bot-to-bot communication, but communication in mixed teams. I.e. participate in a mixed team of bots and humans, and communicate with team mates without them necessary knowing that you are a bot. We are approaching Turing test, but in this case it would be enough to talk "Dota" - i.e. communicate efficiently about the game actions with your team - no need to be able to discuss about any topic.

Side question: if we consider a team of 5 bots, would they need to communicate?

If you wanted them to play "within the rules", they would need some way to communicate via the game.. Text chat would make the most sense since adding in TTS / STT would seem unnecessary.. They could even communicate in some kind of shorthand language that only the bots understand..

I think the grandparent is asking whether the bots would need to communicate at all, as opposed to just "knowing" what the other bots are "thinking".

I kind of envision bots communicating via some form of "side channel" like bees dancing (coded messages in micro-moves/emotes withe their avatars)...

Don't humans usually use voice chat in competitive Dota? I.e. a out-of-game channel (as well as several in game channels such as minimap pings).

Just off the top of my head, they would only need to communicate if computation time is enough of an issue and they wanted to share conclusions without all of them recomputing those conclusions, or if there was some randomness they wanted to share before it became apparent.

I think so. The slight difference in latency would push their decisions slightly out of sync.

Like if the opponent changed where one unit was moving within a lag delta and a different decision was made, but also seeing a teammate bot execute a decision first would alter the inputs for the others.

I'm very curious to see how a 5-AI team would "plan" smoke ganks. Really exciting time for technology as deep learning is moving into gaming.

I'm reminded of the games played in the movie 'Her'.

For the non-DoTA players out there, there's a lot of specific jargon in the above comments.

I've played a few dozen hours, and I understand most of them.

1) "smoke ganks" means that a team goes invisible, in order to surprise the opposing team, and kill as many as possible in a short time.

2) laner: one of the main 3 roles that one of the five players in a team can take (e.g. support, laner, etc).

3) and so on : "shrine", "regen", "soul ring", etc, are all very specific locations or objects or concepts (regen = regeneration).

DoTA is a really, really interesting game. Very strategic, great lore and graphics, and a huge fan base.

laner refers to the initial resource gathering period where you kill the minions spawned from each team's base

That's the laning stage. The laner is the person playing in the specific lanes during the laning stage.

The bot programming system for Dota is set up to have 3 levels of AI:

1) Team level, which dictates what the team as a whole is attempting to achieve

2) Mode level, which dictates what the character is trying to achieve individually

3) Action level, which dictates the specific responses being undertaken

Smoke ganks would be a case of the team level instructing the mode level to simultaneously group then seek a kill, which in turn would tell each of the action levels to move across the map, attack, etc.

For reference: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_Bot_Scripting#...

I'm actually curious to see how it would've done if Dendi would've gone for a very unconventional play. I wonder if the AI is more trained towards the generic 1v1 matchup, which let's be honest, a lot of the 1v1s look play very alike and it comes down to micro. But if he would've done something completely different, would the bot know how to react?

all those limitations are standard rules for 1v1 match. Its not specifically for that match only

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