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OpenAI's Bots Defeated Former Pro E-Sports Players At Dota 2 (theverge.com)
On August 5th, OpenAI's bots defeated four former professional Dota 2 players in two of the three matches played. "There were a few conditions to make the game manageable for the AI, such as a narrower pool of 18 Dota heroes to choose from (instead of the full 100+) and item delivery couriers that are invincible," reports The Verge. "But those simplifications did little to detract from just how impressive an achievement [the] win was." From the report: The OpenAI Five triumphed in convincing fashion in the first game, not allowing the human players to even destroy one of their defensive towers. The humans recovered a little in game two, conquering one tower, but they still got demolished. And finally, in a game three played purely for pride, the humans managed to squeeze out a win. What stands out when you watch the matches is the apparent intelligence of the AI's decisions and the inhuman absence of any indecision. The typical Dota 2 game, even on the professional tier, involves quite a bit of equivocation about whether to engage in a fight, try and shift it to a more favorable battleground, or run away from it completely. The OpenAI team just doesn't need the processing time that humans require, which made its play appear unnatural -- but only in the speed and crispness of the decision-making, not in the content of those decisions.
a COMPUTER will be better than a basement dwelling NERD in a COMPUTER game
now who is better at giving nerds swirlies and telling them to suck my DAMN balls? Me
Teaching bots to miss convincingly was the first problem we had to solve back when we were constructing quakeworld bots. It's hard for me to believe that it's some kind of news when bots defeat humans.
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So wait a second, the pros beat the bots on round three...
Doesn't that seem to mean that the pros simply needed time to learn how the bots thought, and reacted to different situations? And that they did so by the third game, where after two sound thrashings they pulled out a win? Even if close that is quite a performance leap they managed.
I would have been a lot more interested in the results of a ten-game series where the pros had adequate time to understand the inhuman patterns of play the bots had.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Those are hardly professional players, that is a team of casters who never practice together. It is doubtful that any of them could get onto even a second tier team today (well, moon, but then again maybe not). Still an impressive benchmark for AI and top tier pros are sure to get beaten sooner or later too, but what is the point of misrepresenting what actually happened?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
One thing the summary didn't point out was that game three they didn't let the AI choose their own heroes. The humans basically conceded defeat; so for the third game they were just experimenting: The let the "audience" choose the heroes, and they chose heroes specifically which would be poor at playing the style which the computers had played so far, just to see if it could change its playing style to adapt to the new heroes. And the human team chose exactly the heroes that the AI chose for the first two games. After that draft, the AI's rating of its own chance of winning was 2.3%, based only on the draft. The AI adapted somewhat, but not much; and near the end of the game, the AI seemed to be doing a bunch of fairly sub-optimal things; like, it knew it couldn't really win, so it didn't know what to do except random micro.
So, it was an interesting data point -- particularly the importance of choosing the right set of heroes. But it was certainly not a victory for humans. The AI soundly trounced them except when it was purposely crippled.
Matches, post-game commentary, and other information available on the OpenAI Blog about the match.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
I'll be impressed when they create an AI that can only use mouse and keyboard to play.
The only way to make a competition like this fair is to let the human players use as many powerful macros and software aids as they liked.
The other alternative would be an airgap between the AI and the gaming computer in the form of electromechanical servos to drive the controllers and a camera with optical recognition software to see the screen.
Without one of these two things, it's an uneven match and really just a joke.
Let machines play machines, while we watch. Make that a sport.
Unless you think you can do math faster than a calculator.
It should be noted that the bots are cheating and have a different level of access to the information in the game that players do not have. e.g. they have no need to select players to know inventories, precise health, mana etc. In addition to perfect possible information they also have perfect control input.
They also make a big point about how the draft is considered to be one of the more difficult parts of dota and how impressive it is their bots can draft... but restrict the pool from the normal 115 to 18 and eliminate bans rendering it entirely unlike dota drafting. They also restricted 2 items, no summons/illusions, 5 invulnerable couriers (instead of a team having 1, which can be killed) and no scanning (a time-limited radar like ability).
Don't get suckered into the news hype cycle until the bots use a screen with USB input and play the actual game instead of an arbitrary one.
AI defeats top Generals at military wargame, put in charge of country's military strategy.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
First 2 games AI wins, but the description seems like the humans were learning quick and getting better every game, winning by 3rd game. The question would be, would humans continue to win in subsequent games?
"But those simplifications did little to detract from just how impressive an achievement [the] win was."
Which is... not very impressive.
Ok, so I haven't actually played Dota2. I'm assuming it's a twitchy game where reaction speed and knowing when to attack/run is vital. That's how Zergling Blood and the first Dota were. When this whole genre was a mod of starcraft and warcraft, it wasn't very deep. And journalists are just legendarily bad at hyping AI and not undestanding games. Way too many damn people think that "games" are just "kid's stuff". And on the flip side, way too many kids are too easily impressed.
I don't even know why they limited it to 18 heroes. Wide search spaces is something that self-learning is supposed to be able to tackle with ease. ...Unless the entire field of "big data" is an over-hyped myth.