Salt Lake FanX 2019

I'll be at Salt Lake FanX this weekend! Here's my schedule! In between these panels I'll actually be working hard on Dawnrise, but in general I'll be at or near the con on all three days. See you there!

THURSDAY

4:00 pm (151A) Fractal Narrative: Why You need Story Structure

Story structure is important for ALL writers—outliners, discovery writers, and everything in between. Come learn about a few specific methods of structuring and dissecting stories, and then apply them to your own process!

6:00 pm (150G) "Can't We Just Have Pizza?": The Warring Dualities in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is not for the feint of heart. The series embraces the darkness of black magic and worshipping the Dark Lord, but juxtaposes that darkness with everyday teenage life—and, at the best times, bright rays of hope. Come explore with us this fascinating dichotomy, and how it demonstrates incredible worldbuilding and character growth.

SATURDAY

5:00 pm (255A) A Beginner's Guide to Esports and Pro Gaming

Your mom used to yell at you for playing Call Of Duty for 6 hours straight, saying something on the lines of waiting your time and rotting your brain. Now more people than ever are calling gaming a profession. From the comfort of their homes or flying to international competitions, gaming in North America is starting to become a viable career. We will specifically be talking about North America’s growing visibility in the competitive scenes, the formation of the National Association of Collegiate Esports, advertising gaming for a female gaze to grow the fan base, and the inevitable rise of professional gaming in North America.

The International 8

We all have different corners of geekdom that we call our own. That concept in and of itself is a post for another time, but one of my personal favorite corners is DOTA 2, which I've mentioned recently in conjunction with my current research subject, artificial intelligence.

Well, this week it's time for The International, one of the largest and most prestigious esports tournaments in existence--and easily the one with the largest prize pool (almost $25 million this year).

I fully recognize most people don't even know what I'm talking about here, let alone care about it, but, well, The International is a really cool thing. I'm currently still racing to finish book 4, so I won't be able to watch nearly as much of the tournament live as I would like, but I'll certainly still tune in to  catch some of the games when I can (especially those involving EG and Liquid), and be following recaps and summaries on the DOTA 2 subreddit.

The video below relays some of the intensity, drama, and general awesomeness of The International. It's cool, ya'll. Way better than the League of Legends World Championship (boooooooo). Way better than Overwatch League or the Heroes of the Storm Global Championship (meh). It even blows the Starcraft 2 World Championship Series out of the water (and don't even get me started on things like CoD or Fortnight. Zzzzzz.) Them's fightin' words, I know. But, well, fight me on it, ya'll, I dare you.

So, if you're interested, check out the video below!

I'm freaking PUMPED.

Dota 2 and OpenAI

I'm a big DOTA 2 fan. I've been aware of it since it's conception as a Warcraft III mod. I was aware of the WC3 custom game arena back in the day, but spent most of my time playing both the campaigns and online matches of WC3. (And time well spent, imo--WC3 is still one of my all-time favorite video games.)

My younger brothers, though, played DOTA (the Defense of the Ancients custom game created from the WC3 editor) a lot. I looked over their shoulders on occasion and while it looked interesting, there was something about the game that just didn't draw me in.

Flash forward to about ten years later--about 2012--where my siblings and I are playing Starcraft 2 on a pretty regular basis. Most of that involved 4v4 matches, but on occasion my sister's husband wanted to join us, and that meant we had to find a 5-player game. We turned to some SC2 custom games, which included Aeon of Storms, as it was called at the time (another MOBA). We played this for a while, and then found out DOTA 2 was going to be released soon for free on Steam, and, well, the rest is history.

I play the occasional action, role-playing, or survival horror game on PS4, but DOTA 2 has been my go-to game for the past few years, now. It's fun, it's incredibly complicated, and it's very competitive. (It also notoriously has one of the worst-mannered gaming communities in existence, but you win some you lose some, ya know?)

So, DOTA 2 is cool. If you're curious, Juggernaut is one of my all-time favorite heroes, but lately I've also been playing a lot of Pudge.

This screenshot is from a year ago or so.

This one is pretty recent.

Anyway, with all that being said, there are some interesting developments involving DOTA 2 and one of my other current interests, AI.

An interesting exhibition match happened last year at The International 7 last year (the most prestigious DOTA 2 tournament, held every year, which consistently has the highest prize-pools in e-sports history). Dendi, one of the best and most famous DOTA 2 players in the short history of the game, faced off in a one-on-one scenario (DOTA 2 is usually 5v5) against a special opponent: an OpenAI bot--or, in other words, an artificial intelligence developed by the OpenAI research company, funded in large part by Elon Musk.



In short, the bot dominated.

OpenAI has continued working hard on their DOTA 2 program because they feel that the DOTA 2 video game presents a particular challenge for an AI. It is one of the most complicated and nuanced video games in existence. But don't take my word for it, take OpenAI's (from their recent blog post):

Dota 2 is a real-time strategy game played between two teams of five players, with each player controlling a character called a “hero”. A Dota-playing AI must master the following:

• Long time horizons. Dota games run at 30 frames per second for an average of 45 minutes, resulting in 80,000 ticks per game. Most actions (like ordering a hero to move to a location) have minor impact individually, but some individual actions like town portal usage can affect the game strategically; some strategies can play out over an entire game. OpenAI Five observes every fourth frame, yielding 20,000 moves. Chess usually ends before 40 moves, Go before 150 moves, with almost every move being strategic.

• Partially-observed state. Units and buildings can only see the area around them. The rest of the map is covered in a fog hiding enemies and their strategies. Strong play requires making inferences based on incomplete data, as well as modeling what one’s opponent might be up to. Both chess and Go are full-information games.

• High-dimensional, continuous action space. In Dota, each hero can take dozens of actions, and many actions target either another unit or a position on the ground. We discretize the space into 170,000 possible actions per hero (not all valid each tick, such as using a spell on cooldown); not counting the continuous parts, there are an average of ~1,000 valid actions each tick. The average number of actions in chess is 35; in Go, 250.

• High-dimensional, continuous observation space. Dota is played on a large continuous map containing ten heroes, dozens of buildings, dozens of NPC units, and a long tail of game features such as runes, trees, and wards. Our model observes the state of a Dota game via Valve’s Bot API as 20,000 (mostly floating-point) numbers representing all information a human is allowed to access. A chess board is naturally represented as about 70 enumeration values (a 8x8 board of 6 piece types and minor historical info); a Go board as about 400 enumeration values (a 19x19 board of 2 piece types plus Ko).

So, this time around, OpenAI's goal is to have a team of five AI bots go up against five professionals at The International 8, happening in just a few weeks. The OpenAI system has already defeated a team of five former professional players, so things are looking pretty scary for The International this year.

It's all pretty exciting.

At least it is for me :-). I recognize these are two very niche subjects that, when combined, form even more of a niche subject, and I'm okay with that. But, hey, I find it fascinating.

I have a lot of other thoughts about the machine learning processes OpenAI has experimented with to get to the point they are at today in DOTA 2. I have even more thoughts about the implications of such things--that is, after all, in large part what my next project is about!

But, for now, it's fun to sit back, watch, and learn.