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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

I think that smart teams are going to extract what they can out of these bots. Even top players had difficulties dealing with the inhumanness of the bots - people are generally trained to compete against something that acts to some degree on instinct, not probability.

The bots lack if fear in e.g. diving a tower before 5 minutes definitely paid off to a certain degree.

I also personally feel that the caster stack of players intentionally lost their matches to hype OpenAI. The limitations of the bots were very apparent, and the pro players at TI easily outsmarted the bots by either:

- Split pushing with 1 hero and fighting with 4.

- Baiting a lower priority hero (e.g. Lion). The AI would very often vastly overcommit for kills in the lategame.

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Not even lategame, they overcommitted at all points in the game. Those tower dives for trades early game rarely lead to an objective or advantage. They were able to trade early because superior mechanical advantage matters more early game.

By the time midgame rolled around, it was pretty clear how naive their strategy was. It has an element of surprise to it since it's not a very human strategy, but just because it's not human doesn't make it remotely good.

It's like watching a a car drive on a sidewalk in reverse uphill and honking to avoid pedestrians. It's very impressive that the car figured out that driving on sidewalks reduces collisions with other vehicles, and honking reduces the chance of hitting pedestrians, and it's doing that all while driving in reverse which is very hard for a human to do. But no one in their right mind would call that good driving.

That's a great example. It would be great if you could write a blog post on OpenAI Five. There's a LOT of misinformation on this and could use a treatment like this: https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl-hard.html

> The bots lack if fear in e.g. diving a tower before 5 minutes definitely paid off to a certain degree.

It paid off because the bots were familiar with the 5-courier format, and knew that they could ferry in consumables to recover quickly. This is not normal in DotA 2; the game was balanced around consumables being limited in the early game, and the human players OpenAI faced were not familiar with this new, unbalanced state of affairs.

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