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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.
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.
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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.
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People need to get more informed. There are limitations yes, but there previously were a LOT more limitations and they are continuing to lift them.
4 months ago the bots could only play 5 specific heroes against the same 5 specific heroes, they couldn't ward and they couldn't use or play against invisibility or fight roshan.
Those limitations have been lifted as well as lifting the 5 static heroes to a choice for both teams of 18 heroes. They will obviously keep lifting these restrictions until the AI can play against illusions/summons and with the full hero pool.
Also, the AI has a 200ms delay on every action, so I'm not sure I would hardly call it "perfect".
But DotA is so complicated that just playing mechanically perfect is not enough to win. You need to play the proper strategies to win and whats amazing is that the AI is playing a strategy that it formed organically on it's own simply by playing itself for millions of games with very simple rules about what is good and what is bad.