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OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

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Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#211

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…

I haven't actually made an 'It's impressive.. but' comment yet but I've wanted to so here's why I'd say that.

Firstly, much like most things a lot of the press releases have been pretty disingenuous. I'm pretty salty about Elon Musks tweet -

> OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like chess & Go.

1v1 SF mid is several orders of magnitude less complex than an actual game of dota and probably a lot less complex than chess & Go as well. More than that, 1v1 showcases haven't been a thing for quite a while now for good reasons, the last time they did a 1v1 showcase was at TI4 (in 2014). When they did these the format was best of 3 with the first two games being QoP VS Puck and then the decider would be SF VS SF. This was done because QoP VS Puck is a very mind gamey, strategic, match-up whereas SF VS SF heavily emphasizes mechanical skill where you can snowball off of last hits and denies, giving the match-up more of a sudden death feel. You'd expect a bot to be very good at the SF match-up but struggle with the QoP / Puck match-up where there is a lot more decision space.

To go back to what I said about 1v1 showcases not really being a thing anymore: Back in Dendi's day mid was actually a solo lane but these days in a real game the mid has to constantly be aware of support rotations. The bots super aggressive positioning would be heavily punished even in fairly low MMR pubs so I suspect the pros have deeply ingrained positioning rules that make them hesitate rather than match the bots stance.

All that said, the bot is really impressive and I can't wait for the 5v5 bot next year. It will be super interesting to see what strats it goes for and how much it emphasizes the bots inhuman reaction times / micro skill.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#212
You know how some people want a sports league where absolutely every drug is legal so we have the most insane juiced to the gills crazy motherfuckers out there?

I want the AI version of that for video games. Completely unshackled, brokenly powerful AIs fighting against each other in just utterly bonkers displays.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#216

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…

Looks like Bot was defeated at least 50 times - https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6t8qvs/openai_bots_w...

The method the reddit commenter (menohaxor) described to beat the openAI bot reminds me of the Go Deepmind Showmatch, Game 4, Move 78, where Lee Sedol made a highly unorthodox move. I'm reminded of this because in any serious 1v1 mid SF match, no one would try to win in the way by baiting enemy creeps into the jungle repeatedly to win by slowly chipping away at the T1 tower, it actually sounds like a joke on paper. So it seems that for the time being, in real-time games like dota and Starcraft, unorthodox plays and cheese strats could be very effective.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#218

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…

Why not ask them directly, if you actually want to ask rather than make up? For me it makes as much sense as comparing someone sewing pieces of clothes together with someone pulling a zipper. Did people also have races against cars all the time? Is anyone getting excited over some plastic not changing texture when submerged in water for days or even years, while humans get elephant skin rather quickly? I do find all…

> Why not ask them directly, if you actually want to ask rather than make up?

It would be annoying to ask the same question 10 different times in a thread, I think a top level comment is better. Also, I didn't see any made up explanation in the parent comment, it looks like a straightforward question to me.

> the so called civilized world can't even deal with warmongers and power mad cops, can't reign in sheer greed and sociopathy

Can't this be used to shut down literally any conversation? It's obviously not possible for any one innovation or idea to solve all these problems, so it's not really that useful to point out. Would you dismiss any story that doesn't say "war solved"?

> allow for the possibility that someone who is not utterly fascinated by something you like might not be less curious and progressive than you, but the opposite, and that what you think is the bigger picture being a fraction of what they see

Where are you getting this from? Nobody said this, who are you attacking? This comment is so absurdly negative, and it seems completely unprovoked.

Re: OpenAI at the Dota 2 World Championships

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be pretty much impossible for the programmers to "build the behavior in" to the neural network, unless you mean training on supervised data or something.

It's not impossible, it's called inverse reinforcement learning, where they learn a value function from an external demonstration. Then they use this value function for teaching the bot an action policy. Intuitively, the idea is to learn first what are a good state and a bad state, based on external demonstrations, then use that to teach the bot how to act. This kind of learning is similar to GANs, where the discrimi…

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing -- I'll look more into this.
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