What about APM? Doesn't the speed at which the AI can input commands give it a big advantage?

It's like saying that a Go AI would have a huge advantage because it can move instantly, giving the opponent no time to think. Perhaps it contributes, but strategy is far more important.

See "The Marginal Advantage," an essay from the famous Starcraft player Day9: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-...

This essay reminds me very much of the "Playing to Win" series by David Sirlin: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/

It's also worth noting that AlphaGo optimizes its perceived chance of winning the game, rather than its score. It "gets complacent" and mostly plays very conservatively the moment it's ahead on points, because it doesn't care about margins, only about win/loss.

Even if you add time control, Go is a turn based game. You have your own turn to think, unlike in a RTS game.

Sort of. Go players are limited to around ~2 hours per game and around ~1 minute per move: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-standard-time-limits-in-G...

I meant to say that strategy trumps mechanics. Mechanical proficiency is necessary but not sufficient.

It does, but the AI has to do useful things first before doing them quickly is a benefit.

Additionally, humans can use economic reasoning (player built 3 barracks to they can't be building x, y and z). This can lead to AI being excessively safe (economically inefficient).

Definitely, but my guess is that Starcraft AI's are really good at Macro play (building the right units and tech trees), but at the upper levels of SC players win or lose in Micro play (specific positioning of units), which is much harder for an AI to accomplish well, since there are a lot of little tricks. Basically, Macro can be programmed easily, but Micro requires the player to respond creatively.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Micro_and_Macro

It's actually the other way around, I'd say. Individual unit control follows very naturally when you have unlimited APM. And most of the time you can define simple and good criteria on how to position the units (e.g. concave, or exactly the right distance apart to avoid splash damage, or one unit a tiny bit more towards the enemy to be the first one targeted by incoming fire, ...). Build orders can be programmed, yes, but transitioning between strategies properly based on observations and guessing or judging the enemy's strategy is quite hard.

The ones I saw in the competitions lost against humans on such micro rules since the humans quickly intuited their blind spots. The ability to bluff and screw with AI's, a human strong point, is what made me predict Starcraft was going to be way harder than Go. I'm still betting on the human in this one.

And the last line you said is also true to make things even more difficult. :)