None of this really matters though. The AI is improving every day through training. Give it another few months of development and it'll be able to trounce humans under any "fair" set of handicaps you can think of, like limiting average and max APM throughout the game. We saw the same pattern with AlphaGo. There's no reason whatsoever to suppose that humans are fundamentally better at this game than an AI can be.
When AlphaGo first one, people said it wasn't fair because it was running on a whole cluster of computers. Well, within not much time at all, it was good enough to run on a single computer and still beat top humans. We are dealing with exponential progress here. The writing is on the wall.
It's tempting to assume the AI will just keep getting better and better, but that's not guaranteed, and I was happy to see that the Deepmind folks in the video clearly acknowledged this. In the game that MaNa won, it's possible that he did so by finding a strategy the AI agent had never encountered before, causing it to respond with nonsense (e.g. not building a Phoenix and pulling its entire stalker army back to deal with warp prism harrassment). In a game with a strategy space as large as SC2, it's possible that an AI will never be able to saturate the space of viable strategies, and it will always be possible to find edge cases that the AI has no idea how to handle.
The point isn't that the AI won't improve or win with those conditions; I agree it likely will, and soon. The point is that the conditions of the match matter and that this one missed the mark.
It absolutely does matter whether the AI can use obviously super-human techniques, because then it's not nearly as interesting for human observers. I'd much rather watch an AI that was a strategic genius that won despite being hamstrung in terms of micro/techniques.
> There's no reason whatsoever to suppose that humans are fundamentally better at this game than an AI can be.
When AlphaGo first one, people said it wasn't fair because it was running on a whole cluster of computers. Well, within not much time at all, it was good enough to run on a single computer and still beat top humans. We are dealing with exponential progress here. The writing is on the wall.