If you think the how is irrelevant you are completely missing the point of this exercise. Maybe to you only the result matters but for every other task and humanity the how matters.
Simply imagine next taking on a different Game like one version of the Anno series.
If developers did it by hand, you need 50 devs sitting there for probably a couple of months, figuring out the best, rules their sequence and putting them in. That is about $20 Million just to get a similar AI for the next game.
Compare that to download all available replays, requiring maybe 2-3 data scientist to get the data into shape, renting some compute in the google cloud and you get the same or a better result for probably half a million $.
Watch and learn from data alone is why modern machine learning is considered a revolution and novelty. Buying compute time in the cloud is in comparison (to devs and hand coding) dirt cheap and the results are often better.
Deepmind is not working on this problem for the benefit of gamers or the Starcraft community. Making the perfect bot is not the aim. Tackling the next hurdle, next hardest problem in machine learning is. On the way to become better at generalizing the learning algorithms.
Watch and learn from data alone is why modern machine learning is considered a revolution and novelty. Buying compute time in the cloud is in comparison (to devs and hand coding) dirt cheap and the results are often better.
Deepmind is not working on this problem for the benefit of gamers or the Starcraft community. Making the perfect bot is not the aim. Tackling the next hurdle, next hardest problem in machine learning is. On the way to become better at generalizing the learning algorithms.