Well you have to remember who he's talking to. You can sort of tell that lots of people, if they think they're about to be rushed, would make loads of spine crawlers as a defense; the emphasis on "ONE spine crawler" to delay an attacking army just long enough that you can build your own army in response (assuming you see it when it starts to cross the map) with the minimal impact on your economy.

And my point is that basically what he does in the series is start with a super simple set of rules, and then slowly add more subtleties and sub-clauses. That's obviously at some level how he works when he's actually playing -- he has a general plan, then a whole load of patterns that he matches on in how to respond. I'd be willing to bet that he rarely encounters a genuinely new situation for which there is absolutely zero precedent -- absolutely nothing in his experience which is similar enough for him to take an existing response and adapt it for that purpose. How is that different to what AlphaStar is doing?

The main difference is likely to be in how they learn afterwards. If he encounters a new situation in a game, afterwards he will use his model of the game to try to come up with new responses. AlphaStar will most likely have to do something much closer to brute force to find an appropriate response.