[LitFan]

> LoL on the other hand has about 500 champions (give or take)

LoL has 141 champions. Still significantly higher than Dota's 116.

A common note I hear when people discuss open AI playing dota is that it uses pre-made matchups, which reduces the number of matchups considerably.

Would it be that difficult to have the AI play the picking stage? Compared to the complexity of the decisions you have to make during the game, the picks are straightforward - especially if you have performance data on matchups.

The number of practice games the AI would have to play to learn to handle all the heroes goes up drastically, but that's only a matter of time.

[Ajedi32]

They had drafting working just fine in a previous version of the AI. (The one that played against semi-pros a month or so before TI.)

One theory I heard was that the pre-made matchups at TI were designed to prevent the human players from getting out-drafted. (The hero pool was pretty limited, which could result in a different meta from what the human players were used to.) They wanted to make the matches purely a test of in-game skill, not about the metagame. As far as I know though, the OpenAI team hasn't explicitly confirmed that.

[maaark]

I'm pretty sure OpenAI only plays the single simplest hero, mechanically. The other 115 would be varying degrees of "more difficult" to play competently.

Also, it only played mirror matches. If it had to play any hero against any hero, that's 3.393109e+190 possible matchups.

[bilkoo]

I don't think you need to learn all possible matchups to play any matchup, as a human would. You'd need to just learn how to play/counter each hero, plus some 2 or 3 hero combos (not all permutations), so on the order of a hundreds?

[wrsh07]

They've had some updates since then: https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark/

(Plus two shorter / more recent status updates)