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OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

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Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#91
post #56
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main difference is all Dota heroes are viable in competitive. Also, there's no mirror match

Only 3 heroes not picked in TI, iirc. It hasn't always been this diverse though. This patch is particularly well balanced.

Picked heroes have been >80% since TI3. Compare that to LoL's ~50%

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/4n5og5/com...

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#92
post #88
post #84

I wonder if this a good move for Valve. How many people will be loose interest from the game if next year OpenAI manages to pull off the 5v5 challenge, thus bringing DotA 2 to the same level as GO and chess for AI, i.e. beating the best human(s). Has there been any study on the popularity of chess after AI moved in? How about prize pools, as a large driving force of DotA 2 is the competitive scene? I suppose Valve wi…

Of course it's a good move. Millions watched AlphaGo, many of whom have never played Go before. Millions, almost every single gamer will watch AI vs Dota that will be amazing marketing for Valve.

I'm talking mid to long term here. To rephrase, is there a sizeable amount of players who will stop playing, knowing that they cannot ever be the best? Because when AI beats one, I don't believe there is a coming back. For the concrete AlphaGo example, of course it was hugely popular but I would be interested in the evolution on the number of players, how many of those viewers started playing balanced by how many existing players lost interest following the matches (excluding GO researchers :) ).

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#93
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.

If you're interested I did something similar to what you describe for MarioKart http://kevinhughes.ca/blog/tensor-kart. Its a lot simpler than DOTA though

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#94

To be clear 1v1 mid lane is harder than 1 unit v 1 unit in sc. But it is at least 3 levels behind 5v5 human play. So first it's laining, which is showing in the game. Then is the ganking basically 2-3 player working together. Above that that's 5 men team fight. Then you have the strategy planning in the band pick phase, and in game movement coordination. There are other things like item choices, in game communication…

How does having a bot succeed cause appeal to be lost? First you're suggesting that the strategy will be "found" and never beaten (no room for improvement, not even in hero selection). Secondly.. Chess & Go have been around for thousands of years and they still are played en masse daily.

> How does having a bot succeed cause appeal to be lost?

You might think not beating bots is OK. Not for me and many people have been involved in competitive scene. The moment machine beats human, a large part of the competition is gone. The essence is that you want to be the best. But if all you can do is to beat some other inferior opponents, what's the point?

> Secondly.. Chess & Go have been around for thousands of years and they still are played en masse daily.

This is irrelevant.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#95
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…

Humans are not machines.

Games are mostly based on the skills of the players, so should games be balanced by assuming a human can do what a machine can? Of course not!

A bot can usually make computations way faster and more presice than humans.

Let's say a bot plays against another bot, both with different characters. One character might seem really overpowered compared to the other, but that might only be because the bots can react to certain events thousands of times faster than a human. Without that reaction time the tables might turn and the other character might be clearly stronger.

So how fast should we assume a human can do a given action? How precise should we assume the player is at fast calculations?

I do see a lot of things it can balance, but letting bots learn by themselves with no limitations will definitely not work out well.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#96
post #49

this whole emphasis that openai and deepmind put on human/robot collaboration is a paper thin pr move in my opinion. the robots will be better than any human, humans will not be able to contribute a single thing soon. but they try to make us all feel safe by making it look like they benefit from our brains.

I know it's not the same type of AI, but in chess there's a whole scene for computer + human play. A chess engine on its own can have trouble seeing strategic ideas that humans can recognize (e.g. opposite-colored bishop endgames, certain closed positions, and fortresses) so an engine on its own will lose to that engine being assisted by a skilled human player. In other words, humans are still capable for contributing at least a little. That said, it's not much - I think a chess GM paired with an engine will probably only be able to beat an engine rated ~100 or so points higher than their own.

It will be interesting for deep learning, though, where the ideas are a bit more abstract. Perhaps humans will be useful for a while longer.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#97
post #73
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.

DOTA has a bot API (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_Bot_Scripting)

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#98
post #46

OT: Is backdooring prevented by the game engine yet? Annoyed me that a useful tactic was "against the rules"

It's always been prevented in Dota 2. Buildings have backdoor protection, which makes them regenerate lost HP from recent attacks unless there are creeps nearby.

T1 towers don't have backdoor protection though.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#99
I think one of the biggest challenges in moving from 1v1 to 5v5 is the substantially increased possibility of creative strategies. In a 1v1, there isn't that much room for innovation, making it a perfect target for existing AI techniques, which are good at learning what is "in the data" but have not yet been shown to be capable of thinking outside the box. In contrast, in a 5v5 matchup, a much wider range of strategies is available. I'd imagine that in this more flexible setting, AIs would be highly vulnerable to cheese strategies, or in general strategies they have never seen before. Furthermore, if there are any exploitable quirks in the AI (which seems quite likely, given the established lack of robustness of neural nets), I have no doubt that clever human players will be quick to exploit them. On the flip side, I think that makes 5v5 a far more challenging and interesting goal that would be very exciting if achieved!

As a side note: I think the most impressive aspect of this AI is that it was trained without watching any human games. In contrast, AlphaGo was bootstrapped from a bunch of existing human games, which I imagine was crucial to its training. Being able to learn how to fake out the human player without having seen this action before is quite impressive.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#100
post #87

Saw this live and as someone that's played Dota for many years, it's not as impressive as people make it out to be. A Shadowfiend 1v1 is primarily a test of mechanical skill and not judgment. A similar comparison is if a Counter-Strike or Quake bot would instantly snap to your head getting a headshot. Like, yeah, cool I guess, and it would beat 100% of human players 100% of the time, but it's not even remotely as imp…

> but I think that it was one of those cases where it was "coached" (same as the creep blocking).

What makes you think that? In the interview, they explicitly disclaim this.

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