Comment by pphysch
1 day ago
This reminds me of when OpenAI made a splash (ages ago now) by beating the world's best Dota 2 teams using a RL model.
...Except they had to substantially bend the rules of the game (limiting the hero pool, completely changing/omitting certain mechanics) to pull this off. So they ended up beating some human Dota pros at a psuedo-Dota custom game, which was still impressive, but a very much watered-down result beneath the marketing hype.
It does seem like Money+Attention outweigh Science+Transparency at OpenAI, and this has always been the case.
Limiting the hero pool was fair I'd say. If you can prove RL works on one hero, it's fairly certain it would work on other heroes. All of them at once? Maybe run into problems. But anyway you'd need orders of magnitude more compute so I'd say that was fair game.
It's not even close to the same game as Dota. Limiting the hero (and item) pool so drastically locks off many strategies and counters. It's a bit hard to explain if you haven't played, but full Dota has many more tools and much more creativity than the reduced version on display. The behavior does not evidently "scale up", in the same way that the current SotA of AI art and writing won't evidently replace top-level humans.
I'd never say it's impossible, but the job wasn't finished yet.
That's akin to saying it's okay to remove Knights, or castling, or en passant from chess because they have a complicated movement mechanic that the AI can't handle as well.
Hero drafting and strategy is a major aspect of competitive Dota 2.