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As the bots play, they learn a series of tricks

March 27, 2019 by James Ashley

As the bots play, they learn a series of tricks that will give them some edge, or at least something that will give them a little more confidence and give them a little more fun. One of the most obvious of these tricks is the ability to "swap" the two sides from one side of a match. In Dota 2, this is called "counter-ganking" or "swapping." When your teammate swaps teams with another player, he can use the same moves that he did back in the early days of the game to kill the other player. So when it comes to Dota 2's counter-ganking, the bots can do whatever they want to, even though their moves won't help make that move or make it any better. They can do this by simply switching, which doesn't seem to work so well.

"There are a lot of variables involved in this game," says OpenAI's principal designer, Peter Leib, who helped design the game's engine and which also includes a "play-by-play" editor. "People just use computers to make the game. We don't care what's going on. We just need to make sure it works. We don't care if it doesn't. That makes it very interesting."

That's good to hear. If we can make the game so that bots can learn what the game's supposed to be like, then that could help open up a whole new world to people like us who're never really in a position to play the game in real-time, and who want to build their own bots. It also gives the bot an easy way to show their skills, and gives an audience the opportunity to view one of the most famous examples of game-playing in human history. OpenAI's bot is in a similar situation to Valve's in making Dota 2 so that it can be used to make real-time Dota 2 bots.

Leib explained: "We're using the open source OpenAI software that our developers have developed for Dota 3 and Dota 2, and the open source Valve OpenAI is our main tool for that." The OpenAI software was developed for Valve in 2010, but it's been free for more than 10 years. "We've been using Valve for a number of years, and we've used it for a long time," he said. "There are a lot of variables involved in this game."

The OpenAI bots are all part of Valve's "Open Source Initiative," which aims to help open-source