It is amazing what Peter Thiel's OpenAI does! Congrats to his genius.
I sincerely don't understand the downvoting. It's Peter Thiel's as much as it is Elon Musk's OpenAI.
More on Dota 2
81–90 of 106 posts
Re: More on Dota 2
#82I’m by no means an expert, but I’m fascinated by the idea that a neural net playing against itself can substantially outperform a supervised learning approach with a large training data set. I mean, gathering training data and making sure it’s labeled correctly and all that is a huge hassle so if you could eliminate that step or even reduce the amount or quality of training data required that should be a big win for…
Just a guess, but wouldn't this approach used in isolation result in a high potential for getting stuck at local optima? It seems to me that the success of this experiment is the result of interaction with players in different MMR brackets.
Yes, it can. It's fairly common to keep a pool of learners which aren't identical for exactly this reason - either playing against prior snapshots, forking training, or lightly randomizing some components of the learner.
Re: More on Dota 2
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm almost entirely ignorant of DOTA 2, but the coverage suggests to me that it is winning mainly through what I would call "micro" excellence (firing at just the right range, careful maneuvering, and so on). It's clear that this kind of precision control is extremely advantaged by having direct access to the state of the game, rather than having to estimate it in real-time from vision data. So, to me, based purely o…
As someone who plays dota, this bot really isn't that impressive. The hero they chose is seen as a very difficult one to master for humans, precisely because judging distances, current life, current mana, damage etc. is so difficult to do on the fly and even if you can keep track of all of that in your head, you need extremely precise inputs to outplay your opponent. Yet by going through the API, they handed all of t…
Could not have agreed more with my friend here.
The bot would be more impressive if it used vision or buffer to analyze everything. The bot has all of the information which a human does not have. If the human had the same information I think it would be a better competition.
To me it seems that this bot is good only by the fact that is has information and input advantage.
I also want to clarify that this is not an unflavourful feat and that I think it is cool. But I noticed that a lot of members in the Dota community did not know of the bot API which is likely the case here.
Re: More on Dota 2
#84That's a good hero to lead off with. Soulstealer (is the HoN name, blanking on the original Dota name) is a hero with very basic mechanics. Or rather, there's a ranged, AoE ability, an ultimate that boils down to "stand in the middle and hit the button", but the rest of the mechanics boil down to "last hit lane creeps well" which is a huge Dota 2 game mechanic. And this hero does better as they succeed at last hittin…
Nevermore, the Shadow Fiend is the original Dota name.
Re: More on Dota 2
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly why this is not impressive to me. The point is to be able to learn the rules, but all I see is some of not only the rules, but the actions already prespecified in many cases. Yes its hard, and thats why humans still rule the roost.
Humans learn from each other and don't puzzle everything out from first principles. So I wouldn't put that restriction on a computer intelligence either.
That is fine, so long as we are not expected to hold both that it is not a big deal when it is not achieved, and is a big deal when it is achieved. Personally, I incline towards the latter.
Re: More on Dota 2
#86I agree that it's a bit of a over hype tactic in a toy situation which might be marking to maybe make people think the technique and bot are more capable than it is. But I think people are overly down on it too. It's a demonstration of a technique in a way the general public (and gamers) will understand. OpenAI isn't going to make money off of building game bots... people wouldn't watch. The human drama is a major ingredient in e-sports.
But we shouldn't be down on this while we were going gaga over a lego sorter done the same way a month or so back.
It looks like for some things we can almost have a plug and play ai solution. EG, like we are seeing with image classifiers, this doesn't take years of phd doctoral research and game theory to build up a world class bot. Which is what everyone used to do. This is moving some of these techniques into the "get data set, get hardware, download library, train" plug and play type solution which we're seeing more and more with in other areas like machine classification. Eg stuff anyone with a few years of experience can do, maybe not amazingly, but better than they could hand coding the solution. The problem becomes one of gathering good training sets or building an accurate simulation to train in.
This means, I think, that you'll see way more of these types of ai solutions where people would have balked at a hand coded solution before. This in turn looks a lot like mobile's change to computing where things that were annoying to do on your home pc became different just because you had a camera + gps + computer + radio in your pocket.
I know my company has started using classifiers a lot more for things that are kinda sliding bad user actions instead of coding up huge rules engines. We may not be as effective as a several area deep engineers writing rules and doing data analysis, but instead we have 1 engineer per problem space being about 70% as effective which is still a huge win over not solving the problems at all.
The funny thing is that this bot actually pulled off the stereotypical hollywood training montage with just a few weeks of hard work it beat the best in the world. Just get some sweet rock in there and you've got it all.
Re: More on Dota 2
#87I know it has been mentioned a lot the past few days, but since the articles keep flowing about it I'll mention it again: It's a great feat and kudos to the openai team, but it is VERY unfair for the human players who rely on a sensory interface vs a direct API connection. That's unlike chess or go where the interface isn't important. The really impressive feat will be an AI that uses the same sensory information to…
And the response as I've seen it on other threads: It probably doesn't make a big difference, and will outperform humans there too, and it would be a huge waste of computing power to train it that way. I think OpenAI should show that the AI can derive (a close aproximation of) the API data from videos, but I don't think that building a closed training loop would add much value here.
You can't get the things you get from the API from videos alone. If a player wants to see the amount of mana an enemy has, he has to click on the enemy, you don't see it usually. Same for items. There is an active component in information gathering in Dota (and those actions take time/clicks away from other things you could do at the same time).
Re: More on Dota 2
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely disagree. An API is software's natural input mechanism just like the senses are a human's natural input mechanism. Having the AI use human senses unfairly handicaps it. More importantly, however, is that this is not the key problem. The key problem is teaching the AI strategy and tactics. What heroes to pick? Where to lane them? When to rotate? What items to buy? What spells to level up? What enemies to…
I'm almost entirely ignorant of DOTA 2, but the coverage suggests to me that it is winning mainly through what I would call "micro" excellence (firing at just the right range, careful maneuvering, and so on). It's clear that this kind of precision control is extremely advantaged by having direct access to the state of the game, rather than having to estimate it in real-time from vision data. So, to me, based purely o…
> winning mainly through what I would call "micro" excellence
This certainly is an advantage for the bot. But it's also clear the bot understands some sophisticated parts of dota. It understands how to control the creep equilibrium via the aggro mechanics. Skill at this is one of the things that separates pros from casual dota players. In the video footage you can see sumail and rtz are surprised by this aspect of the bot. It also understands how to cancel salves as well as bait with them. That's all pretty impressive for a bot trained up from self play.
Re: More on Dota 2
#89I believe biological explanations might account partially for the openAI bot outperforming human players.
Re: More on Dota 2
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's not clear that it has learned anything like "superhuman" levels of strategy But still, it's learned "human" levels of strategy, and that actually amazing. And let's not forget, that this is only beginning, more stuff to come. IIRC - some third-party StarCraft AI actually invented a trick that was later used by human players on pro-level tournaments.
Indeed - I believe it was a highly successful build order that strayed from the 'norm' at the time. I was quite into SC2 at the time and this was something of a big deal.
It was the 7 roach rush. Used extractor trick which was generally considered a bad idea by humans due to being economically bad as well as a double overlord which is also against general build principles, but it turned out that it smoothed into an insanely efficient early attack.