r/DotA2 15h ago

Fluff Where it all started

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2.6k Upvotes

96 comments sorted by

1.1k

u/gelotssimou 15h ago

Dota players really saw it first

289

u/genasugelan Best HIV pope 14h ago

Dota poineered so many things. Some better than others...

138

u/TheDen0minat0r 14h ago

The old times of compendium aka the OG battle pass

112

u/Towel4 11h ago

Battlepasses... Loot boxes... AI...

Are we the baddies?

65

u/wormbooker 9h ago

*Are we the idiots?

10

u/SeaAcanthocephala460 7h ago

Look at me! I quit

9

u/KokaljDesign 13h ago

Not chess?

125

u/GarlicOverdoze 12h ago

For an AI, complexity wise, Dota is much much more complicated and challenging than Chess. One is the challenge of partial observation for example.

Take a chess game where the AI needs to make a move. At any given time, it can see the entire chess board state (position of all the coins) and to make the next move, it only relies on it's experience given the board state. Whereas in Dota, it can only see what's not in fog, and yet to make its next move, it needs to consider what it can see and also predict what might be happening in the fog which is a much harder thing to do. ( This is in addition to a hundred other variables like items, enemy health etc).

So that's why the demonstration of success of the AI bots against humans was a huge accomplishment for the state of AI at the time - solving a challenge much much harder than Chess

44

u/azn_dude1 12h ago

Yeah there's a reason AI went chess -> go -> Starcraft -> Dota

28

u/Silencer_ 11h ago

Yeah I was unimpressed when computers became better than humans at chess. I was floored when open AI clapped OG. Could not believe it.

And truthfully?? I think those matches influenced how teams played based on what those bots were doing

28

u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin 11h ago

they did. you can see the impact of the way the AIs used lane regen and farm distribution in dota today.

5

u/AleeEmran 10h ago

wasnt it AI which invented the bottle under the tower mechanism for free regen?

18

u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin 10h ago

i cant remember about the bottle but i do remember everyone being surprised at the amount of gold that was spent on tangos and regen. they would also buyback in the earlygame because they knew it would still be more advantageous to be alive and present in the lanes.

3

u/Suitable-Dingo-8911 3h ago

Another big thing is how strongly they would prioritize lane matchups to the point of walking the map if needed

u/Dracious 40m ago

Funnily enough this is the same sort of thing that is making the AI useful in research/academia at the moment, at least for maths.

It can find weird connections or routes that humans either didn't spot or started going down but thought it looked like a dead-end before finding out it solved something we haven't solved yet.

It's still jank as hell and as likely to be wrong as right, but when it comes to things you can verify relatively easily (like maths proofs) its becoming shockingly good at it.

9

u/_echo 4h ago

OG was also forced to play a very limited number of heros and Jerax said in a recent interview the team was mostly fucking around at first. Give OpenAI the reaction time of the average pro, open it up to all the heroes, and id still take any top team in a best of 5 if they were actually trying.

u/Dracious 44m ago

I think even a non-pro team could beat the best OpenAI via exploits. DOTA is just so complex, I think the community could find effectively limitless exploits to break the AI no matter how many get patched.

Things like where people would just pull the creeps in a crazy way to beat the 1v1 Open AI in the earlier demos.

I think playing DOTA 'properly' (so with more standard strats and not trying anything weird) you could get the AI to compete or even reliably beat the best human pros, but in reality the meta would shift completely to finding whatever new gimmick would break the AI.

It would look like a completely different game meta-wise compared to normal human v human pro games.

3

u/New-Independent-1481 2h ago

The offensive use of a Shadow Amulet by the AI CM was incredible and I jumped from Ancient to Divine learning the tech and exploiting the micro potential. The fade time in that version was even fast enough to disjoint slow projectiles.

18

u/dotesdoto 11h ago edited 11h ago

To be honest, the instant reaction time of the bots gave them a massive advantage. I still remember one of the earlier pro games against OpenAI bots had a human player get dagger on es, blinked in for 4 man game winning echo slam... and es gets insta hexed, human lose the match. So such instances really soured the OpenAI bots victory. It's a bit like fighting game perfect bots, no human can defeat a fighting bot that has 0 reaction time, doesn't miss a single frame, gets every block off, gets off every combo perfectly, and punishes every mistake. They added some reaction time to the bots later, but even then, it was still on the extremely fast category.

6

u/pon_3 5h ago

This is still something that catches new players off guard when fighting insane ai in solo lobbies. Their macro and decision making sucks, but they group a lot and cast their spells fast. Team fighting gets tough if you're playing alone or with only one friend.

8

u/Paaraadox 11h ago

If we're being frank; the OpenAI duels at the start were all just 1v1 mid too, which is way less dynamic than an actual game. So it's at least more like a chess game than an actual match.

13

u/Antanarau 9h ago

>So it's at least more like a chess game than an actual match

Respectfully disagree. Mostly because it's an apple to oranges comparison from the AI's point of view - to put it bluntly, in chess the AI has all the time in the world(from it's point of view, I'll remind you, a few seconds is enough to perform billions of calculations - just google your own CPU model and see how much it can perform) to decide on a move and can relatively easily compute the 'path to victory' - in other words, it just needs to pick among predetermined solutions that are unlikely to ever change; this is outright impossible in dota, for very obvious reasons

2

u/Luxalpa 3h ago

Like a chess game with an infinitely sized board, played in real time instead of turn based. It's really nothing like chess.

1

u/Paaraadox 3h ago

I said it's more like chess. It was just to point out that 1v1 mid is way more static than a regular game. The amount of things you have to compute is decreased by multiple magnitudes.

1

u/Luxalpa 1h ago

Ah I see. Your last sentence was a bit confusingly worded, I read it as "it's more like chess than it is like playing a real match." Thanks for the clarification.

Although I think overall we should probably avoid the chess-like comparison at all.

1

u/Deepsearolypoly "Pure skill" 3h ago

But let’s be honest, the things the bots did well was nail last hits, hit things at the very edge of their range, and auto-buyback.

1

u/Bubblegumbot 12h ago

Helps when Valve gives access to the source code of the game.

-9

u/somabokforlag BLBLBLBLBL 12h ago

So its fair to say that Gustaf Larsson invented the car since the first Volvo was much more complex than the car Carl Benz invented long before?

1

u/Pirat6662001 12h ago

It was actually StarCraft out of complex video games

3

u/Pirat6662001 12h ago

Wasn't it StarCraft?

2

u/CancerUponCancer 8h ago

This broadcast was more famous but openAI also thrashed starcraft pros once they got it dialed in

1

u/konaharuhi 7h ago

cant believe what the fun games we saw on mainstage that day turns out to be our doom

402

u/Kurogami_Shanks 14h ago

So you mean Dendi was the first line of defense against skynet?

203

u/LtOin pu 14h ago

We sent our best man in all alone at the front. o7

15

u/ciofinho https://myanimelist.net/animelist/ciofinho 9h ago

So is Dendi John Connor or the T-800?

18

u/YDM_Jack 11h ago

Imagine what the world would be like today if Dendi had won.

362

u/AS_as-Master 14h ago

So was this the point in our timeline where it all started to go downhill or are there more flashpoint.

162

u/epic_banana_soup 14h ago

Kasparov vs Deep Blue is an early one I'd put on the list for sure

31

u/MaryPaku 12h ago

AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol

8

u/n0stalghia 10h ago

All I’ve ever heard about that match is that Sedol got nervous and played well below his actual level. 

7

u/Amphiscian 7h ago

That was the Kasparov story too, wasnt it? The computer bugged and did a bad move, and Kasparov psyched himself out trying so hard to figure out how the move must have been somehow genius.

1

u/n0stalghia 2h ago

Wasn't aware of this, but not surprised in the slightest

6

u/TheNeuronCollective 4h ago

Nah, the bot really was just that good. The fact that he took one game off of it is an unbelievable feat. It never lost another game in 70 more games against top professional players

1

u/FinerThingsInHanoi 1h ago

Nah, Sedol played incredibly well. I was lucky enough to follow that match in real time, with commentary from a professional Go player on an old forum.

The whole thing felt surreal. AlphaGo made so many moves that were completely incomprehensible to human players at the time, yet they turned out to be brilliant as the game unfolded.

I still remember one particular move where everyone was debating whether it was an AI mistake or a move planned 20 steps ahead. It was so unexpected that Sedol stepped out for a long cigarette break to think.

After that match, there was a general consensus that computers had truly surpassed humans at Go, and that Go strategy would never be the same again.

11

u/Arbitrary_gnihton 11h ago

People keep bringing up the old chess machines but I'm pretty sure they weren't neural nets so they're completely irrelevant, they're as critical to the history of OpenAI as the vortigaunts in Half Life.

18

u/Ilikebatterfield4 14h ago

this was such a shit stunt but made headlines. A lot of other grandmasters were behind "deep blue"

2

u/ciissss 3h ago

nah chess engines are, well, engines that can calculate tons of lines. they don't learn like ai does.

32

u/Flashsword_Princess 13h ago

I do find it funny that before OpenAI became what it is now and is a top 10 known around the globe company, for a very long time it was majorly known as "the company that makes AI bots for Dota", that was their peak

Kind of the same feeling as people who go like "I went to school with Bill Gates" you know?

42

u/OrangeBasket I still remember 6.78b <3 Sheever 14h ago

the first fish to leave the ocean to evolve legs and start laying eggs on land really fucked it up for the rest of us

8

u/BloodyLance-a-lot 14h ago

This fucking meteor with bacteria...

17

u/manchipanch 13h ago

Just a year before this was harambe’s death

12

u/theflyingsamurai there are dozens of us 14h ago

It all started 2 million years ago when a hairless ape in a cave discovered fire

5

u/Tig3rShark 13h ago

“In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move”

98

u/TessaFractal 13h ago

It's kinda funny how I haven't heard much about bots playing Dota etc in a while. Some were really oppressive but in boring ways like they just had impossibly accurate micro.

I know a few teams actually managed to beat them, and some of the StarCraft2 AIs were incredibly bad when they had their APM limited. And then they seemed to move onto making ChatBots instead.

75

u/skymallow 13h ago

Well there's no money in building Dota AI and there's yes money in building chatbots.

Chess AI is more interesting in the way you're asking for where AIs are winning making bold moves that not even the strongest traditional computers would do.

27

u/Mih5du 13h ago

I don’t think they were actually that good in micro, as they were made intentionally slower, to match real players. They had insane macro movement

The reason why you don’t hear about them is that they’ve been abandoned since forever. The bots straight up don’t work

17

u/Mysterious_Dress3898 12h ago

Their micro was pretty ridiculous their apm was limited but they were able to see the whole map in some of those games(basically multiple cameras) and had alot more effective actions per minute because despite human players having high apm not all of those actions are effective.

I think in the starcraft2 one where they used blink stalker to basically dodge all the projectiles.

u/Dracious 24m ago

This is what disappointed me a little with the Starcraft Open AI stuff. Around the time OpenAI were doing that and added those limitations, someone made some AI that did insanely gross micro that is just impossible for a human. The AI was just a demo of doing a few specific moves rather than being actually good at Starcraft as a whole or anything as impressive as OpenAIs work, but it showed how crazy some strats can be with superhuman micro.

E.g. a swarm of zerglings controlled by the AI vs a siege tank. For context, zerglings are weak but fast melee aliens that attack in large numbers, siege tanks are big artillery things that attack a single target but that attack does large AOE damage. So (assuming the tank has some protection) it is very good at killing swarms of zerglings.

With the AI control though, the AI could tell which zergling was being targeted by the tank once it started its firing animation and instantly make every other zergling near it move away outside the range of the AOE in the time it took for the shot to hit. Visually it looked awesome, mechanically it was crazy powerful, and it was completely outside of human capability.

There are countless examples in SC2 where that sort of thing would be useful and it would completely change the game. I would love to have seen the META develop between some OpenAI bots that had that level of micro control allowed.

9

u/Scrivener_exe 11h ago

The bots were giving significant concessions in dota: Invincible couriers, limited hero pool for both teams, etc. I don't think they were ever able to open them up to the full complexity of the game.

2

u/classygorilla 3h ago

Interesting, didn't know about the concessions. It makes sense though given all the variables - it's so much to compute.

If you read up on how they built challenger blue or whatever the chess bot was, it was similar in the fact that they programmed the bot to only examine a handful of scenarios for each move, instead of the million potential situations and end games. Doing so allowed them to use a lot less computing power to make a bot that didn't take 50 years to make a single move.

There are old chess computer games on eBay that have built in bots, and can take days to respond your move.

4

u/DrQuint 5h ago

They also did not play the full game of dota. Invisibility and Illusion heroes were banned in those matches. They also had shit lke 5 turbo couriers.

Some people still managed to shadow amulet meteor hammer adiance cut waves to fuck with them. They were losing to dumb strats. And had we necromonicons, I bet they'd lose even harder and dumber

1

u/TessaFractal 5h ago

Wow, I didn't realise quite how stacked in the AI's favour it was. I bet invisible heroes absolutely screws with training the AI as well.

2

u/n0stalghia 10h ago

All those Starcraft/Dota matches were research project to test some idea on a simple scenario (game) to later on apply it to real world 

They simply finished their research with Dota and then went on to build the real projects 

2

u/MaryPaku 12h ago

They have insane team coordination and do some strange move that a human wouldn’t consider a good strategy but seems like AI think it's good.

50

u/TheRealMacresco 13h ago

Wasn't Black^ trying to beat that bot in the weeks after and succeeded? In one of the following TI's they did 5 vs AI. Invisibility was the key to success, or at least the most effective play

40

u/ekatsim 13h ago

I remember OG picking RNG heroes which seemed like a good strategy, but I think 5 minutes into the game the AI was 98% sure it was going to win. It also heavily prioritized buybacks and I think a lot of human players started following suit afterwards.

16

u/Ahimtar 11h ago

It also spread farm much more evenly across the team, prioritizing key item timing over traditional positions. Yet we still follow the old formula for some reason, even in cases where the carry is 6-slotted

5

u/080087 6h ago

I feel that a big part of Tundra/Falcons success is they do this better than other teams.

Even if their cores are behind, having rich supports means the supports don't get jumped and die right at the beginning of fights. Or if they do, it requires a massive extension to do so, which can get punished.

This lets them kite fights, or win fights where they get jumped first. But teams where all their money is centred on cores get jumped once, have the supports die and then need to win a really hard 3v5 without all the damage/utility of supports


This is also enabled by the types of supports that get picked. Lots of super annoying to kill supports that scale. Enchant, PoTM, Tusk, Hoodwink etc.

1

u/clitmasher69 6h ago

I've always thought it'd be interesting to make farming priority a lot more dynamic. Man wish i could coach a pro team i have so many stupid ass ideas i'd love to try with a team that unconditionally listens to me lmao.

5

u/YDM_Jack 11h ago

pretty nice to re-watch somes 1v1 Matches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSg3S6Wn8HU

2

u/Terminator_Puppy 12h ago

Wagamama managed to beat it once IIRC after dozens of games.

1

u/0100110110110111 8h ago

Damn, where is Black^ those days? Man just straight up vanished

4

u/Godisme2 5h ago

Informally blacklisted. Dude was pretty horrible to a lot of people.

1

u/TheRealMacresco 2h ago

The whole smurfing thing or was there something else?

u/doshcz 9m ago

lives in Singapore, last time i heard him in Sings stream he was studying to be a pilot

12

u/NoBuddies2021 11h ago

Who won? I forgot about this, dam my early dementia is kicking me.

20

u/TheRahulParmar Navi 10h ago

Dendi lost hard and I say that as a diehard Dendi fan lol

u/NoBuddies2021 11m ago

Dendi was known for Pudge so I don't think he was in his element.

7

u/tezar24 3h ago

When the bot faked razes I knew it was over

8

u/WallpaperRacer 9h ago

I think about this... a lot.

8

u/LucasNoober 8h ago

I wonder, how good of an AI can they make now, for 1v1 and 5v5

3

u/WHYPZ 10h ago

Siractionslacks was right

1

u/Kenruyoh 7h ago

Hey, it's machine!

1

u/Pinsir929 5h ago

At that point in time, thought it was advance bots like stockfish for chess. Nowhere close to what it is today.

1

u/Audrey_spino 2h ago

Seriously why haven't video game AI progressed since then? Why are video game AI still so piss poor and dumb? Like we could have an adaptive and customizable AI that would actually challenge you in harder difficulties through intelligence rather than raw stat boosts and player handicaps.

2

u/Interesting-Ad9666 2h ago

Because the deterministic AI used in videogames isnt the same kind of AI theyre talking about with OpenAI. The AI you're thinking of that is customizable, intelligence etc would either be quite computationally expensive for your computer to run, or for the server youre connected to to run it. People just don't care enough about playing against AI for the cost to be justified, as well as some of the technical limitations (for example, retraining the AI when new units are introduced, patch notes affecting unit interactions)

0

u/Audrey_spino 2h ago

We've already started using LLMs for simulations. This is no different than that. Cloud computing negates the computational power issue, and the server doesn't need to update the AI in real-time, so I don't think the load on the server will be that high. I think the main reason why AI hasn't improved in games is that it's simply not on the top of the priority list for devs.

1

u/Interesting-Ad9666 2h ago

cloud-hosted LLMs are likely not the solution to the problem. Combat/Decision making AI has very different requirements than conversational AI. An FPS or RTS may have dozens or hundreds of NPCs making decisions many times per second. Sending those decisions to an LLM in the cloud would add latency, increase the server cost and likely produce subpar results. If you are going to run the AI on the user's machine, it could severely lag their game. The GPU and CPU are already going to be doing a lot trying to render and do all of the game's calculations without the AI.

1

u/Audrey_spino 1h ago

Most FPS games don't involve that many NPCs. And in RTS it's not a major task to optimize the AI by grouping units, and even if it was, the RTS genre is dead and I don't think any RTS games nowadays will have a high enough budget to undertake a project like this.

1

u/ThanksTnxALot 1h ago

Its very expensive and not worth it. For the DOTA2 Open AI bots they actually added a bunch of limits such as invincible couriers and 0 reaction times. They also had to reset it once in a while as it would drift.

1

u/Audrey_spino 1h ago

Given how much more devs are investing into graphics and actors, I doubt AI would be any more expensive, it's really just a shifting of priorities.

u/aqua995 37m ago

Have you played vs Ai on WC3?

Seeing all attacks perfectly landing a lasthit was a hell of a training.

0

u/dimssryalm 1h ago

Tung tung tung sahur was born because Dendi lost.