What I am generally pointing out is that if you had a professional team or a high level amateur team that spent a year practicing a fundamentally different version of the game and they beat OG that really doesn't say a lot. It's like if a pro team played an odd custom game mode against people who played it all the time and already knew some specific gimmicks. Dota just in general is much less a hard input mechanics game compared to most which makes it interesting as a project for AI research but makes dropping in a bunch of players even harder. In my opinion if an FPS game played competitively is 80% raw input skill and practice/20% knowledge of the game, dota is closer to 30%/70%.

Putting a Riki mid in the first game and a Slark pick the second game doesn't really tell me a whole lot, since Open AI's team bought dust against Riki and the hero pool says 'early push and win or lose' which generally defeats a Slark that generally needs items this patch (47% win rate at this point). They clearly indicated in prior posts that them buying dust and dealing with invisibility are part of the skills, and it's really not hard to end up with a strategy of while in an attack/aggressive state and see Riki, use dust if available.

Many teams use a 4 core/hard 5 strategy at the not top tier and it's reasonably effective. The 4-defend-1/3 core strategy generally only works because Roshan/Aegis is in the game to make that min/maxed core that's ahead take additional chances with less risk and also when there are clear heroes that are just a tier above the rest in the current patch or meta. If you take that out or remove aegis planning from your team 4 core is almost trivially the way to go. Even in my casual experience this is generally how I've ended up playing so maybe it's less surprising to me. Once again I point at given the format was a professional team that is built around a 3 core strategy/mindset really the right team to play in this mode?

The two drafts for Open AI were Sniper, Gyro, CM, DP, Sven and CM, Gyro, Sven, WD, Viper. Both of these are push to win at 20 minute drafts and they were played as such. I did not feel like OG did enough ordinary/basic strategies given to carry them to the mid-late game like their drafts indicated they wanted to do (ES, WD, Viper, Riki, SF and Sniper, ES, DP, Slark, Lion). They tried some clear gimmick strategies just to see if the bots were totally broken, if they intended to do creep skipping they would have picked Axe who was in pool. It's hard for me to felt like they played better when it was the natural power spike of their draft, as if Open AI was held off or maybe a more reasonable hero was chosen other than Riki/Slark and a more coherent strategy with what was provided was used it would have been a better game when it hit 30-40 minutes. Instead their experiments with gimmicks didn't really pay off and they lost to the hard push team and didn't have a strong hero set to push out the lanes and create an opportunity if they failed.

Also, the Open AI drafts are ones that I feel like I were constantly playing in 2012-2013ish until a lot of the new heroes were added to the pool to make them less popular and relevant as they introduced movement/displacement mechanics that make the original hero pool less practical. Since those new heroes are taken out, this old form got put back in.

I really doubt that illusion control/micro control would have really made a difference and if it did I would have actually preferred to see that because that is new and novel. Dota is very different to previous RTS game AI's where every unit if controlled properly was of equal strength and could be maximized. Dota illusions generally are just worse in every dimension and have value in disjointing spells, doing rat things, vision, and maximizing some items/abilities that have fixed attack modifiers but otherwise are not a primary source of damage (100 damage with a 33% damage illusion after 15 armor is like 17 damage which is not a big swing when heroes regenerate constantly). Compare this to mutalisk micro where a perfect division of an attack from a group can mean two or three units instantly killed instead of one which generally would be the limit of human control. Divide and conquer with illusions for attacking purposes I would say is generally a bad strategy because I still believe killing the hero in front of you before attacking the next guy is still probably the best option. I find it hard to believe that perfectly controlled illusions would affect the game in a meaningful way compared to highly skilled players, and would have loved to see that. Sure some really great Meepo players can shine, but the game inherently has solutions to that problem and most others (echo slam, burst magic damage). In fact that's the kind of thing that I enjoy the most out of watching AI driven gameplay is seeing when they push the limits of what humans can even accomplish and to see if I can learn anything from it.

There are also plenty of other real world equivalents that once you change the rulesets that other people do better like speed limiting in NASCAR at Talledega, a football team that is better in the snow, or a hockey team that plays in a rink with different dimensions. I just wished that we had ended up with a more reasoned view of what happened and could celebrate their actual achievements in context than saying they beat a pro team at their own game which is kind of where the headlines have been going. This is just fundamentally different to what Alpha Go or Deep Blue did where they soundly and completely conquered on the same playing field.