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OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

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Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#71

Post by kevinwang »

Tangokat wrote: post #58

It is so weird reading all these comments. Almost half of them start out as "it's impressive.. but". Is it human nature or are HN commenters just so sceptical/negative of all the new tech? One of the OpenAI guys mentioned that they could potentially use the same technique in real life applications like surgery. Surgery is not "just" run on a computer it has a physical component too. Is that really the next step or wa…

>Is that really the next step or was he just throwing out a random example people could understand?

More of the latter than the former. He was talking more in broad strokes about ai research in general then this specific project.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#72

Post by AndrewKemendo »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #52

These types of MOBA games are a good precursor of military unit management. To be honest, I'm not totally sure whether to be happy or sad about this sort of thing. The strategic control of drone units on a combat field, without the loss of personel (on the countries with this technology, anyways) should make me happy, and does, to a point. BUT the potential for abuse (and, no, I haven't even begun to extrapolate towa…

These types of MOBA games are a good precursor of military unit management.

Not really.

There may be some limited use cases where this beats traditional sandboxing, wargaming or milsim. However, the primary distinction is that DOTA and the likes have fixed rule sets (albeit large and complex), and a near infinite number of simulations that can be run, wherein the actual "battle" will conform to those rule sets and play variability.

It may not seem like it, but we (military) only have a tiny slice of possible data from the past few hundred years, that would be appropriate to train a DNN on. Not only that, there are few wars that conform to previous war patterns. There are some constants, and we study those, but they don't really give you what you need for troop movements and tactics the same way as is done in DOTA.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#73

Post by 147 »

kibwen wrote: post #42

In the interest of a "fairer" comparison, I wonder how much of a difference it would make to force the AI to simulate mouse/keyboard input and interpret the raw screen buffer output, rather than using direct APIs into the game's guts, to more faithfully emulate its human opponent. I'm guessing the peripheral inputs wouldn't be much of a hurdle, but the image processing step could be very interesting.

How do you know it's not doing that already? I was under the assumption that open ai agents interacted with the environments through vnc.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#74

Post by thefreeman »

ahh wrote: post #54

The developer interviewed claimed that there was no domain-specific knowledge and implied (though didn't explicitly state) there wasn't any training against non-OpenAI bots or players. (I'd love to know the reward function they used for whatever Q-learning variation they ran with.) If this is accurate, one of the things I'm most impressed with is that the bot figured out creep-blocking. (I can't find a good GIF, but…

I don't know that they specifically said there was no domain-specific knowledge. iirc they said they didn't "teach it the rules of dota" but they also said the training involved "coaching". I interpret that to include showing the bot useful techniques (like creep blocking) which the AI then learned leads to higher win rates, etc.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#75

Post by DannyDaemonic »

habitue wrote: post #59

So an interesting thing you could do as a game company with an "unbeatable" bot is to use it to balance a metagame. Let the bots all play each other and tweak character stats etc until they win a proportional amount of the time. (This presupposes that the bot learns the game the way OpenAI claims it is, without needing to learn from player replays or from playing in a very different way than human players do with tre…

I think balance is a bigger problem than people realize. It's much harder than you'd think, and the most common way of balancing things is to simply make them more "samey".

I was part of the Warcraft 3 beta. When it started all the races felt so unique. It's a bit foggy now but I think, for example, all the elves buildings - which appeared tree like - would automatically regenerate. Once they started balancing the game, all these special traits fell away. All the races were homogenized and despite still being different, all played much more similarly. Honestly, it ruined the game for me. I feel if I had just picked it up upon release I would have enjoyed it, but watching all these unique traits and play styles fade away made me realize what could have been.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#76

Post by duskwuff »

darrenkopp wrote: post #60

Really was quite interesting to watch ( https://www.twitch.tv/videos/166172514?t=7h3m10s ). Honestly, the bot played _extremely_ well, but I think the biggest advantage was how much faster it's reaction time was and it's movements were likely much more precise than a human is with a mouse. I'm pretty interested in seeing their 5v5 results as well. It seems like that will have similar results as the bots can coordinat…

"No soul ring" has been a traditional rule for 1v1 competitions since at least TI3 [1]. It doesn't necessarily make sense for Shadow Fiend play, but it can make some other hero matchups, like Bane and Omniknight, drag out forever.

The shrine is inactive for the first five minutes of a normal game, so it's a non-factor in most 1v1 matchups.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1ka4bp/q_why_was_sou...

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#77

Post by trevor-e »

bhouston wrote: post #61
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #52

These types of MOBA games are a good precursor of military unit management. To be honest, I'm not totally sure whether to be happy or sad about this sort of thing. The strategic control of drone units on a combat field, without the loss of personel (on the countries with this technology, anyways) should make me happy, and does, to a point. BUT the potential for abuse (and, no, I haven't even begun to extrapolate towa…

Yes, this is perfect for a future of swarms of drones fighting it out against each other.

I think it's scarily close to happening, or already has. Just the other day I saw the Drone Racing League on one of ESPN's alternative channels, and all I could think about was how effective they would be as kamikaze bombs. If these people can race drones up to 150+ mph and turn sharp corners through obstacles, then the military is already two steps ahead.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#78

Post by CrystalLangUser »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #65
0xdada wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DotA is not a MOBA and it's not a very good precursor for military unit management. I'd say Starcraft is a better comparison, and they are working on applying DeepMind to that right now [0]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/09/blizzard-and-deepmind-turn...

DotA and Dota 2 are the games that helped define the term MOBA. I'm not sure why you're saying it isn't one, especially since it's in the first sentence of both Wikipedia articles.

Sometimes people prefer to label dota as an ARTS: Action Real Time Strategy.

Some people dislike the MOBA nomenclature because it comes from Riot (maker of League of Legends; a clone of dota). In addition the term is pretty vague. Call of Duty, Starcraft, and DotA could all technically be “MOBAS”.

ARTS describes it a little better but I don’t think that term is great either.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#79

Post by CrystalLangUser »

ylor wrote: post #67
0xdada wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DotA is not a MOBA and it's not a very good precursor for military unit management. I'd say Starcraft is a better comparison, and they are working on applying DeepMind to that right now [0]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/09/blizzard-and-deepmind-turn...

Dota definitely is a MOBA. Dota is the MOBA from which all the others are devised [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_aren...

Some people dislike that term. Many people in the dota community prefer ARTS over MOBA. Though yes, technically it’s a MOBA; many other games could be MOBAs because it’s fairly vague.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#80

Post by hhmc »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #57
hhmc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting they had information that a human player wouldn't (i.e. cheating), I just suspect that they may have access to a richer api.

Which would give them what? The second clause of your sentence contradicts the first.

The statements are not contradictory - they can have a superior api which doesn't permit 'cheating'. For example they could expose c++ api rather than a lua api for performance concerns. Furthermore some of the api calls (e.g. GetNearbyCreeps) have arbitrary restrictions.
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