Congratulations to the @OpenAI Five team! Whilst the bots may have lost we've all gained from watching your journey :) My live stream commentary is linked and below I'll add a bit of post game commentary.
twitch.tv/videos/3011031…
twitch.tv/videos/3011031…
First, we should all note how impressive it has been to watch the restrictions removed in the last two or so months. The largest was from a fixed set of heroes to a small hero pool but there are many on top of that. IMHO the game is now functionally equivalent to normal gameplay.
The addition of a vulnerable courier was an enormous change that I haven't seen much commentary on. This courier can be seen as the sixth player of @OpenAI Five, responsible for ferrying items to you through no man's land. Poor little fellow needed a longer bootcamp! :'(
The bots still had trouble using wards which give vision. Wards were overlapping and frequently placed in range of their own tower (useless as the tower already provides vision both of visible and invisible units). Another result of the complications due to less restrictions tho!
I also think I saw some fairly major bugs that likely resulted in the loss. Axe (big scary guy w/ an axe 😅) has an ultimate called Culling Blade. If the enemy is below a certain HP they die instantly, you move faster, and can use Culling Blade again. He flubbed more than once 😭
Necro had similar issue. His Reaper's Scythe deals damage according to how much HP was missing yet he used it very early in many fights. Even more important, if the character dies from Scythe, their respawn time is +15/30/45 seconds. Axe +Necro had more than one instance of this.
As opposed to AlphaGo, @OpenAI Five still has only used self play. As someone on my stream noted, many of the behaviours these bots need to learn are not easy from self play. There's a treasure trove of millions of human DotA games they could also learn from.
Finally, these models can run on your laptop. There's a gaming community of millions of DotA players who could benefit from it. There's a million interesting research questions that this work could result in. Robotic arms use the same backend. I can't wait to see what's next! ^_^
On a personal note, DotA1 was why I ended up on Twitter with this being one of my first ever tweets (and one of ten in all of 2008) ...
(tldr we coordinated university students to play DotA by Twitter SMS 😅)
(tldr we coordinated university students to play DotA by Twitter SMS 😅)
and even pondered in 2016 with @roybahat and @jackclarkSF (who I think was still at @business at the time?) about DotA / LoL being an amazing proving ground for AI. @OpenAI proved us right - and there are still many mountains to climb ^_^
