How to Train Your OpenAI Five

Because OG are mechanically better than them.

Flawless reactions make for a big difference (see euls/hex scripters for the impact of that on a game). Throw in perfect global state and zero mistakes, it becomes very very hard to out-skill.

The question that people actually care about is whether the AI can be strategically better. If you watch pro dota you'll see that there are often teams which flash, briefly super strong and then fall off as better teams study them and learn to counter their play. OG themselves have had serious problems with CIS teams that play fast (making them arguably the worst team vs a fast playing AI).

The hero pool is also important, as currently it's very limited in offering counters to deathball.

> OpenAI Five, if trained against the full hero pool, would completely and utterly dominate gameplay at the professional human level. It wouldn't even be close.

Fundamentally disagree. The mechanical advantage increases but the strategic disadvantage also increases. Time will hopefully tell.

This one is not so certain. One of the OG players (Notail) mentioned after the game that the AI definitely had a few weaknesses such as:

* AI didn't bother checking the trees after the splitpushing hero disappeared from the map.

* AI doesn't handle invisible units well.

* AI has poor warding.

He said he regretted not exploiting these weaknesses more. There are certain splitpush ("rat Dota") heroes that potentially could have helped OG to the detriment of AI e.g. Antimage, Furion, Morphling, Juggernaut, etc. Instead, what we saw was OG using a non-traditional split push hero (Viper) from the limited hero pool try to split push, which failed because the hero got ganked too often (Viper does not have natural escape mechanism unlike many of those splitpush heroes above and he didn't itemize for splitpush e.g. Shadowblade first item) and it doesn't push very fast. With these splitpush heroes and well-placed observer wards, I think a splitpush-based lineup could possibly take the game.

OpenAI's play was very impressive. I did not see this coming after OpenAI lost to some of the weaker pro teams at last year's TI. However, I would give OG even chances at winning a longer series (Bo5 or Bo7) over 5 or 7 days where they could learn from OpenAI's playstyle and figure out strategies on how to exploit them similar to how in longer Dota 2 tournaments, we see initially successful strategies on Day 1 get countered by the tournament final. Another analogy is the 1v1 bot that OpenAI released. When released, even pro players would lose to it. However shortly after, the combined intelligence of the Dota 2 community discovered an exploit where if you lead the enemy creepwave into the jungle, the AI bot glitches out and the human player eventually wins [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_w...

Putting a Riki mid in the first game and a Slark pick the second game doesn't really tell me a whole lot, since Open AI's team bought dust against Riki and the hero pool says 'early push and win or lose' which generally defeats a Slark that generally needs items this patch (47% win rate at this point). They clearly indicated in prior posts that them buying dust and dealing with invisibility are part of the skills, and it's really not hard to end up with a strategy of while in an attack/aggressive state and see Riki, use dust if available.

Many teams use a 4 core/hard 5 strategy at the not top tier and it's reasonably effective. The 4-defend-1/3 core strategy generally only works because Roshan/Aegis is in the game to make that min/maxed core that's ahead take additional chances with less risk and also when there are clear heroes that are just a tier above the rest in the current patch or meta. If you take that out or remove aegis planning from your team 4 core is almost trivially the way to go. Even in my casual experience this is generally how I've ended up playing so maybe it's less surprising to me. Once again I point at given the format was a professional team that is built around a 3 core strategy/mindset really the right team to play in this mode?

The two drafts for Open AI were Sniper, Gyro, CM, DP, Sven and CM, Gyro, Sven, WD, Viper. Both of these are push to win at 20 minute drafts and they were played as such. I did not feel like OG did enough ordinary/basic strategies given to carry them to the mid-late game like their drafts indicated they wanted to do (ES, WD, Viper, Riki, SF and Sniper, ES, DP, Slark, Lion). They tried some clear gimmick strategies just to see if the bots were totally broken, if they intended to do creep skipping they would have picked Axe who was in pool. It's hard for me to felt like they played better when it was the natural power spike of their draft, as if Open AI was held off or maybe a more reasonable hero was chosen other than Riki/Slark and a more coherent strategy with what was provided was used it would have been a better game when it hit 30-40 minutes. Instead their experiments with gimmicks didn't really pay off and they lost to the hard push team and didn't have a strong hero set to push out the lanes and create an opportunity if they failed.

Also, the Open AI drafts are ones that I feel like I were constantly playing in 2012-2013ish until a lot of the new heroes were added to the pool to make them less popular and relevant as they introduced movement/displacement mechanics that make the original hero pool less practical. Since those new heroes are taken out, this old form got put back in.

I really doubt that illusion control/micro control would have really made a difference and if it did I would have actually preferred to see that because that is new and novel. Dota is very different to previous RTS game AI's where every unit if controlled properly was of equal strength and could be maximized. Dota illusions generally are just worse in every dimension and have value in disjointing spells, doing rat things, vision, and maximizing some items/abilities that have fixed attack modifiers but otherwise are not a primary source of damage (100 damage with a 33% damage illusion after 15 armor is like 17 damage which is not a big swing when heroes regenerate constantly). Compare this to mutalisk micro where a perfect division of an attack from a group can mean two or three units instantly killed instead of one which generally would be the limit of human control. Divide and conquer with illusions for attacking purposes I would say is generally a bad strategy because I still believe killing the hero in front of you before attacking the next guy is still probably the best option. I find it hard to believe that perfectly controlled illusions would affect the game in a meaningful way compared to highly skilled players, and would have loved to see that. Sure some really great Meepo players can shine, but the game inherently has solutions to that problem and most others (echo slam, burst magic damage). In fact that's the kind of thing that I enjoy the most out of watching AI driven gameplay is seeing when they push the limits of what humans can even accomplish and to see if I can learn anything from it.

There are also plenty of other real world equivalents that once you change the rulesets that other people do better like speed limiting in NASCAR at Talledega, a football team that is better in the snow, or a hockey team that plays in a rink with different dimensions. I just wished that we had ended up with a more reasoned view of what happened and could celebrate their actual achievements in context than saying they beat a pro team at their own game which is kind of where the headlines have been going. This is just fundamentally different to what Alpha Go or Deep Blue did where they soundly and completely conquered on the same playing field.

An average human game lasts 30 to 45 minutes. If OpenAI simulated 1,000,000 games, that'd be over 28 years of non-stop gameplay to a human.

So by limiting the amount of heroes, humans are clearly at a disadvantage. In the last international, from the hero pool, 110 heroes were picked and 98 were banned.

The micromanagement claim seems fair when it comes to illusions.

  OpenAI Five is the first AI to beat the world champions in an esports game, having won two back-to-back games versus the world champion Dota 2 team, OG, at Finals this weekend.

True, any given team will tend to strongly favor a subset of heroes, but that subset by necessity must allow for a wide range of play styles and strategies.

The limited pool for OpenAI largely favors 5-man "deathball" tactics, which OpenAI plays fantastically well (an amazing achievement in its own right), but also excludes all the heroes best suited to countering that strategy. Sniper, for example, is an extremely strong hero in just the right circumstances, but is generally considered fairly weak and readily countered (in the current patch) by heroes such as Phantom Assassin or Spirit Breaker, neither of whom are present in the OpenAI pool.

Aside from anti-deathball specific counter picks, heroes that favor a wildly different approach to the overall strategy (split push/"rat" dota) such as Tinker are also excluded.

Most importantly, being able to work out what kind of strategy the enemy team is going for during the draft and adapting your own picks and bans accordingly (and luring your enemy into useless bans or counter-picks) is a huge part of the game. Once the draft is over, teams then have to be able to adapt their desired strategy to the reality of the team composition they landed on, and the best approach may change several times over the course of the game. I really want to see an AI that can realize that something isn't working in its current deathball strategy and that it needs to switch to playing both sides of the map at once by keeping the enemy occupied in once place while taking objectives in another (or vice versa).

To reiterate, I am incredibly impressed by what OpenAI has already shown, and I look forward to seeing where they go next, but I do think there are some very interesting problems in the full game that OpenAI has yet to demonstrate a solution for. I have similar slight disappointment with the recent AlphaStar StarCraft II project, which was a similarly amazing piece of work but also seemed to indicate that each agent (swapped out after each match with the human player) was only really able to execute one strategy and had no ability to recognize that something wasn't working and adapt (as seen in the final (and only) loss to the human player).

So, do I think that human pro players would defeat an OpenAI trained on the full unrestricted game in a best-of-three match? No, almost certainly not, but I do suspect that the humans would win in, say, a best-of-seven, if they had the full suite of tools available to allow them to discover and adapt to what I see as fundamental shortcomings of the AI.

Chess has no micro, but also has no hidden state. You don’t really need any concept of what your opponent is thinking to play optimally.