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The bigger issue is the diversity of the pool, more so than the size. 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. |
For now.