[backpropaganda]

> I think it is amazing that one relatively simple mathematical construct can produce such a complicated behavior.

No complicated behavior was produced.

> Or, I don’t know, maybe it says something about the complexity of Dota 2 game?

Dota 2 game was not played. A tiny subset of the game was attempted. Since people seem to be just buying whatever OpenAI propaganda sells them, let me be specific: only 18 heroes are in the game. The combinatorics explode when you go from 18 to 110. Go on a 5x5 board is a joke compared to 19x19 Go. This is not hard to understand.

> Do short term tactics combined with fast reaction time beat long-term strategy?

In a game designed for humans, perhaps yes, because the game wouldn't be tested against extremely fast reaction times. The game was meant to be a strategic game for humans. Just because OpenAI Five appears to play Dota 2 (still doesn't beat any serious players though) doesn't imply anything fundamental about tactics beating strategy.

[prestonh]

>> No complicated behavior was produced.

The bots were routinely pulling off coordinated team behavior that players couldn't figure out, but that worked. This has to qualify as complicated.

>> Dota 2 game was not played. A tiny subset of the game was attempted. Since people seem to be just buying whatever OpenAI propaganda sells them, let me be specific: only 18 heroes are in the game. The combinatorics explode when you go from 18 to 110. Go on a 5x5 board is a joke compared to 19x19 Go. This is not hard to understand.

Already mentioned that the hero pool has been opened up. Along with the removal of the other restrictions (invincible courier, items) this is basically pure DotA.

>> Just because OpenAI Five appears to play Dota 2 (still doesn't beat any serious players though) doesn't imply anything fundamental about tactics beating strategy.

The bots beat a team of 5 casters (granted, with some of the older restrictions in place) who are individually in the top 1% of DotA players by MMR.

You're flat out wrong or at the very least inaccurate in all three statements that you made.

[gsich]

>The bots beat a team of 5 casters (granted, with some of the older restrictions in place) who are individually in the top 1% of DotA players by MMR.

And without the 5 couriers the caster team probably would have won.

[backpropaganda]

> The bots were routinely pulling off coordinated team behavior that players couldn't figure out, but that worked. This has to qualify as complicated.

This is just not true. Do you know the game? Are you speaking as a player? Or are you telling us what's written in the OpenAI blog post? There is nothing a player couldn't figure out. The caster team lost because of the broken game and because few of them were rusted (Merlini hadn't played for months). The bots were garbage at the TI, and got beaten without any problem by the pro teams.

> Already mentioned that the hero pool has been opened up. Along with the removal of the other restrictions (invincible courier, items) this is basically pure DotA.

The hero pool is still 18 heroes. Dota 2 has over 110 heroes. Can you please try to think what makes you say something so wrong with so much confidence?

> The bots beat a team of 5 casters (granted, with some of the older restrictions in place) who are individually in the top 1% of DotA players by MMR.

Casters don't count as serious players. Would you regard any sports commentators as good players? Would you put 5 of them randomly in a team and say that's representative of the best players of that sport?

[prestonh]

> This is just not true. Do you know the game? Are you speaking as a player? Or are you telling us what's written in the OpenAI blog post? There is nothing a player couldn't figure out. The caster team lost because of the broken game and because few of them were rusted (Merlini hadn't played for months). The bots were garbage at the TI, and got beaten without any problem by the pro teams.

A former player. I'm not regurgitating the blog post, I'm regurgitating what the players themselves said. The AI got beaten by pro teams (top <<1%), but the matches were competitive in the early game, and only later did the bots run into trouble. To give a couple of specific examples of novel behavior, the AI figured out a solid deathball strategy and was able to exploit that to beat a lot of teams, it liberally used fortify to protect creeps and sustain pushes, and it was way more aggressive in rotating its supports to critical lanes in the early game. Now, no single one of those things is entirely novel, but the combination of all of them (especially by a machine that learned it on its own) is what is novel, and what allowed the strategy to be successful.

> The hero pool is still 18 heroes. Dota 2 has over 110 heroes. Can you please try to think what makes you say something so wrong with so much confidence?

Admittedly this was a mistake, the language they used in their blog post was "Removed our last major restriction from what most pros consider 'Real Dota” gameplay'", which is poorly explained and made me think the hero pool was entirely open.

DotA is basically 2 games, the drafting part and the gameplay part. The bots made huge progress in figuring out the gameplay part, which is super impressive.

>> Casters don't count as serious players.

Maybe we're using different language. The casters are definitely in the top 1% of players, or more, which I consider "serious", but not "the best". But no one was arguing that the bots are "the best", which is self-evident from their loss at the International.

Anyways, this is all beside the point. What OpenAI was able to do was really impressive and is only helping to advance the state of reinforcement learning. You argued that there's nothing impressive about what they've done, but I'd love to see you point me to an example of an ML algorithm that learned to play a team game as complex as DotA at a competent level.

[backpropaganda]

At a competent level? None exist. Being better than random doesn't count as competency. As others have said in this thread, it wouldn't even pass as median performance.

> is only helping to advance the state of reinforcement learning

Zero new algorithms or ideas were introduced by OpenAI Five. We just learn that model-free RL doesn't scale and we already knew that from Atari and robotics benchmarks.

[duskwuff]

> This is just not true. Do you know the game? Are you speaking as a player? Or are you telling us what's written in the OpenAI blog post? There is nothing a player couldn't figure out.

A lot has been made of the 1v1 Shadow Fiend OpenAI player having figured out an edge case of Magic Stick recharging. (Casting spells while outside vision doesn't give charges to the enemy hero.) This mechanic was not previously known to the OpenAI team, but was known to professional players -- it's not the epiphany it's made out to be.

[tlb]

It was a subset in early demos, but not any more: https://blog.openai.com/the-international-2018-results/

[backpropaganda]

This is the kind of misinformation OpenAI is so great at. Otherwise smart people like tlb are led to believe that this was the full game even though it's not even close to the full game. Thanks for helping me make my point.

[_ptgt]

It's an Elon Musk outfit; misinformation is in its DNA.