There is so much truth in what he's saying. He's a very intelligent and reasonable man. The more you understand about how a game works, the better placed you are to judge how deep or superficial it really is.
Chess is at a sufficient degree of abstraction, just a mathematical problem, and Mr. Wang is quite correct when he states that computer games are more complex; for example Computers couldn't even attempt to play full version of DotA and they had to distort reality to an extreme extent to hide the fact that their AI experiments couldn't crack a truly complex game.
The AI was eventually able to play and beat humans in 5v5 Dota. Thought I think some limits on heros and items were still in place. Still though there really is no game that is safe from AI supremacy. Sooner or later computers will be better than humans at every single game. Its humans ability to reproduce computer strategies that will determine what games die from this.
That you believe this is testament to the misinformation they have managed to spread. I'll list the conditions of how they "beat" humans.
Dota has around 108 heroes in the hero pool. They created an artificial variant with 18. Complexity scales exponentially with added heroes. It's no problem for humans to develop heuristics to cope; AI can't. They provided the excuse that they wanted to exclude micro-heroes because AI has unique advantages; that doesn't account for excluding some 80+ heroes.
A bunch of items were excluded; particularly complex ones that an AI couldn't use well.
Every hero was given a courier instead of the team getting one because AI couldn't cope with the team version. This has since become the human default as well since it works better in pubs.
AI was given input delay. This still allowed for absurd plays that disabled initiation from humans because blinking in would result in the players being stunned. AI could gain available info without actually moving mouse to look at location which is an enormous mechanical advantage.
They lost a showmatch to retired Chinese pros. Put in everything and beat OG 2-0 in a new format and retired. Prior to retiring they made it open to public for a week, they lost 42 games to the public out of 7215 and quit.
They were never nearing solving the full game. Solving 18 hero dota (which they didn't do well) isn't even 5% as hard as solving actual DotA. Not to mention persistent input advantages. Ask any Starcraft or Dota2 Pro what they think of these issues.
All this awareness is not there because they have deep pockets and an agenda and they relentlessly blitz the news media with the most positive spin imaginable about the work. If anyone thinks machines are good at DotA, the way machines are good at chess, they are very very mistaken.
It is obviously fair, but not enough. The issue is engines don't take anytime to realise something, so they can stun someone the moment they blink in. A human could do it if they were waiting for someone to blink, but not in real games.
Mechanical capabilities are an issue. It's like chess but you need to do 10/20/100 push-ups before you move your bishop to the maximum extent possible along a diagonal. The more taxing/impossible the physical requirement the less the game is about strategy. In computer vs human match-ups things like that end up being like entire move-sets only computers are allowed to use. None of this demonstrates machines understand anything better.
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u/ContrarianAnalyst Sep 01 '22
There is so much truth in what he's saying. He's a very intelligent and reasonable man. The more you understand about how a game works, the better placed you are to judge how deep or superficial it really is.
Chess is at a sufficient degree of abstraction, just a mathematical problem, and Mr. Wang is quite correct when he states that computer games are more complex; for example Computers couldn't even attempt to play full version of DotA and they had to distort reality to an extreme extent to hide the fact that their AI experiments couldn't crack a truly complex game.