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.