[kirrent]

As another example you can consider the apparently successful DOTA2 and Starcraft 2 bots. They'd be interesting if they taught us new ideas about the games in the same way that AlphaGo's God move uncovered something new about Go. But they didn't. They excelled through superior micro and flawless execution of quite simple strategies. Watching pros trying to hold off waves of perfectly microed blink stalkers reminded me of seeing a chess engine in action. A computer grinding down their doomed human opponent using the advantages offered by being a computer rather than superior human-like play.

[grogenaut]

I'm pretty sure that the bots changed the dieback meta around the last TI in seattle when openai last did their demo pre canada TI. So I disagree that the "ai taught us nothing". Prior to that dieback was seen bad. After that people did the math and realized that spam respawn, the money and growth matter more. They may have altered the game after that, I don't know. I only paid attention when it was at Climate Pledge / Key.

[Ntrails]

The AI's play meaningfully added ideas of ways to play dota2 iirc. It wasn't just buying back, the way they played around early advantage hyper aggressive, not much farming, spam buying regen to stay out etc.

On the other hand you could generally beat the first "1v1 mid" bot by just cutting the wave behind its tower. So adaptation to new stuff was not good in isolation.

I would have loved to know whether given more time/prep/replays/practice pros would have figured out the holes. My guess is yes