When Watson won Jeopardy, its lead designer thought a 5 ms reaction time was fair because one time a human anticipating the buzzer light got 2 ms.

Of course to any reasonable person a consistent 5 ms is obviously vastly superior to once in a blue moon lottery-winning luck.

Sounds like it's the same deal here, where the designers made some effort to level the interface playing field, but also left in some advantages like instantly being able to select individual units (or whatever it was the other players felt was not humanly possible to do). Probably because, at some level, they really want their system to win.

Yes, the point of the entire project was for the system to see if it can win.

If we have reached the point where to even risk a loss requires implementing artificial restraints on the AI...well...

They aren't really artificial restraints though, more like artificial advantages without them. The interface delay challenges are pretty relevant to making things fair in almost ANY competition. The physical part of the interface is an essential part of the game here.

You aren't really testing the thing you really want to test otherwise.

You could probably play tennis pretty well against Nadal if you made him wear goggles that gave him a quarter second delay in response time, but that's not really a fair test.

All other things being equal, if you match up two chess players, and one can just say or think the position instead of having to physically move the piece before they hit the clock, that advantage will accumulate over time.

I wonder if implementing tactical pause would eliminate interface advantages. Players can pause game, scroll around map and give orders to units before unpausing and watching them execute.

It will be a different game, but you can see how AI does against humans tactically and strategically.

Strategy is limited by available tactics, and the ability to execute them. Your (human) tactics and strategy would necessarily change if you and your opponent were required to use a mouse that can only move across the screen over the course of a couple seconds, or if you could only click once per second, or if the computer added noise to when/where your mouse click arrives.

Strategy and tactics are a function of constraints. If an unconstrained computer can beat a constrained human, have we really shown that its strategy and tactics are better? To do that, you'd have them to play under the same constraints. Or at least have the constrains be close enough, which is what people are debating.

However the computer can macro while in a fight which is something people can’t dI. We would miss the fight and lose the game. It’s not just a tactics game. Attention span and where your eyes are matter.

It’s so bad that below master people shouldn’t really be doing too much micro during a fight because they’ll lose out on macro. Even in pro matches you see attention span issues and sometimes avoidance of too much micro to win. Really good Micro is going to win you any battle.

I’m in diamond 2 and I definitely micro in battles. The difference between platinum 1 and diamond 3 is largely macro but it very soon becomes micro as well.

Elite players do this all the time. Serral would use his standard tactic of attacking in two places as the same time, and alpha star couldn’t figure out the best way to deal with it. When alpha star did the same thing to him, he would mitigate the smaller attack and even predict alphastar’s escape route and crush it.