Will OpenAI Five win the professional team at The International?

The progress of artificial intelligence from OpenAI in the development of Dota 2 is the best illustration of the meme "here ... then we'll see." Now we are in a place where the AI ​​has already beat the top players one-on-one, learned to play with a team with ordinary players, overcame significant restrictions, beat a semi-professional team.

The next step is “that will beat the best team in the world, then we'll see.” Will it work out? Who thinks.

How is the preparation going

The International 2018 began on August 15th. Now comes the team stage of the tournament. The game with AI will go beyond the framework of the main tournament, it will be only demonstrative matches. Dates and conditions have not yet been announced, but will definitely be known soon. While people are fighting for access to the playoffs, the "team of bots" is training.

The last time OpenAI spoke in detail about the preparation after winning a demonstration match in early August:

Our standard approach to development is to train every major revision of the system from scratch. Nevertheless, the current version of OpenAI Five takes into account the parameters of training between the six major revisions of the system, which were conducted from June 9. Each subsequent revision was launched taking into account the parameters from the previous one.

On August 16, the OpenAI technical director tweeted that he was looking for teams to train the latest version.

But for now, as he says, even the most advanced AI technologies will not fix themselves bugs.

Can OpenAI Five win

The main argument of most skeptics is that what the Five plays in is not Dota 2. The restrictions necessary for playing with AI make Dot almost a different game. Playing with Five, people get into conditions to which they have not yet managed to adapt.

“Now the bots are behaving too straightforwardly,” says William Lee (Blitz), one of the losers in artificial intelligence, “He is becoming a bit predictable. It seems that if we play a few more games, we would learn how to handle it quite easily. ”

The publication of Cybersport.ru in its conclusions after the match agreed with this argument.

The restrictions seem insignificant, but because of their totality, the game has acquired a completely different character than the usual matches in DotA. According to the developers, every day artificial intelligence plays with itself so many matches that their total duration is about 180 years. The casters had no experience in this mode, so they lost the first card crushingly, and only on the second they were able to fight the opponent.

The publication noted that bots are actively using the terrain, find new unpredictable tactics that even people can easily learn. At the same time, in their opinion, bots are easy to get into a dead end, they make many mistakes, and the tactics developed are often out of place.

On Habré also analyzed a demonstration match and made positive conclusions in favor of AI:

3-4 AI characters consistently broke the towers of human opponents, masterfully “tanking” the tower in turn, in order to preserve their own creeps and quickly destroy the structure. In addition, bots were noted by the fact that non-standard wards were used, which also tanked towers for them. As a result, in one of the games with guests of the event, bots entered the enemy’s base already at the 9th minute (climbing up to the enemy’s base, even at 15–18 minutes, is considered exclusively early timing).

Also, bots effectively redistributed the experience between themselves, avoiding drawdown of characters 4-5 positions, distinguished themselves in calculating the damage (when the last strike was applied, the bot did not continue to catch up with the goal, clearly realizing that there was enough damage to kill). ”

One of the most discussed moments in the characteristics of AI was the time of its reaction. The initial 80 milliseconds of OpenAI increased to 200, but, as some commentators noted, even this figure is too large. In their opinion, it does not take into account the time that a person - having already reacted to - spends on aiming with the mouse and fighting doubt, if something goes wrong.

It is likely that in version Five for the demonstration match at The International, OpenAI will be able to overcome even more restrictions.

What will happen to eSports if OpenAI wins?

After winning Five in a demonstration match on August 5, an interesting discussion broke out on Facebook with Sergei Orlovsky - the head of Nival (which also uses neural network AI in its Blitzkrieg 3 strategy). Sergey wrote:

First, it is beautiful. Secondly, this is the end of eSports, and the reason why I did not invest there. Third, it will make many people think again about the problem of coexistence with AI.

There are many counterarguments to this point of view.



For example, Victor Zakharchenko from FunCubator thinks this :

I am sure that eSports will be a sport with the strongest penetration of technology into the player. But not a substitute for him. Sport is about ownership (I speak as a fan of fantasy sports). And being in the lines of the code is somehow difficult.

Whatever it is - all this will happen before our eyes. And the game of AI with a professional team, and the life of eSports with the consequences of this game.

The death and life of eSports, coexistence with AI seems to be things relatively far. For now, we will wait for all limitations to be overcome and Five to participate in the tournament on a par with the human participants.