Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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> 18 out of 117 heroes does reduce complexity quite a lot, especially when you pick ones with less complex mechanics.

Sure; but you can train one agent/hero so the training scales in a somewhat linear fashion once they get beyond ~15-20 heros. The computer won't be able to nail the full complexity of the game - but neither can a human, and the evidence from Go is the amount of the game a computer can grasp is much greater than a human.

Humans can't fully understand full DotA either; it is common for pros to be surprised by mechanical interactions or quirks on specific heros.

It might be an interesting theoretical challenge, but there would need to be some solid evidence of that beyond OpenAI calling it done and going home. Especially given the breakneck speed that the first 17 heros got trained. The AI was improving faster than a human does in MMR/day rates for specific heros. It looks like they got bored once the outcome became clear but needed a lot o work to achieve.

> If this was a task in the real world, the AI would have the same interface as humans: The screen.

This part of your argument is weak; you are relying on a computer having human limitations to show that it is superior. Computers don't have human limitations; that is a significant part of why humans can't compete with computers.

> I think for AI to be able to claim that it is better at a game than humans, the AI ought to be playing the actual game, and use the same interface.

What could you do if the bot people don't agree with you? When TeamDotaBot2000 is winning every game on the DotA ladder you can write them an angry all-chat message saying they didn't really win while your hero dead and their destroying your tree. That'd blend right in with the usual DotA crowd.

> You might think that would be a trivial and useless exercise (like it would be in Chess/Go), but I'm really not convinced of that for video games...

It isn't trivial; but it also isn't hard. It is time consuming and there are a lot of practical things that need to be solved. But if the resources are spent, it is expected that computers beat humans in any field with formally defined rules and objectives. That is a big deal.

>but you can train one agent/hero so the training scales in a somewhat linear fashion once they get beyond ~15-20 heros.

No, you can't. The problem isn't training the AI to actually play all the heroes, that's the easy part (and also it's not even required to play the full game, no human can play every single hero), the problem is training the AI to play against all the heroes. That's the challenge - and that's the part that doesn't scale linearly at all. The more heroes the opponent can pick, the more complex your "behavior tree" has to become to think about every possible combination of what they could do.

>you are relying on a computer having human limitations to show that it is superior.

No, I rely on a computer playing the same actual game and not cheat. Because that's pretty much exactly what they're doing right now. It's like modding the game so that every animation is color coded by if it would currently hit you, every minion perfectly marked if it is in execution range, every champion running around with circles that show their ability ranges, with your champion being color coded depending on which ranges, etc. (Except actually even worse than that.)

Again, in the actual real world an AI might have a 360 degree view of the environment, but it still has cameras and it still needs to do naturally imperfect object recognition algorithms on everything - it doesn't just get floating point values for every object's position and trajectory from God.

>When TeamDotaBot2000 is winning every game on the DotA ladder

If TeamDotaBot2000 wasn't directly affiliated with Valve, they would literally get banned for cheating. Because they're not interacting with the game like a normal player would, and they are doing things even a perfect, god-given AI playing the game through the same interface couldn't.

>it is expected that computers beat humans in any field with formally defined rules and objectives.

I expect this to be eventually true in any field. By so much that humans will be fundamentally useless in terms of advancing knowledge, culture, or anything in between. But if that's going to happen in 20, 50, 100 or 10,000 years really isn't clear to me, and neither is that all they'd have to do is put a realistic amount of hardware into their current approach to learn the entire game. The complexity of this task is definitely scaling exponentially, and just like you can't just throw twice the compute at a 128-bit cryptographic key because it worked so well for 64-bits, you can't just throw more compute at a game to learn to play against more champions.

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