[llasram]

I'd noticed too that the winner claimed to use just a variety of hand-rolled strategies, and wonder why that is. Has anyone had the time to dig into the code? Is this a case of well-writen "naive" code trumping theoretically-better but poorly-implemented algorithms, or are there properties of the game state-space which make e.g. Monte Carlo tree search perform poorly?

[PeCaN]

Speculation: the winning author is simply good at StarCraft and knew what to implement. His implementation was probably simple but did one thing very well, which beat more complicated/smart AI implementations from worse players.

Monte Carlo over the StarCraft state-space would be very hard to implement but I don't see any particular reason why it wouldn't work decently well.

[kzrdude]

The winner's bot had 16 different build orders it could play https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23817376/Starcraft/AIIDE...

[Havoc]

I think its just a case of this still being pretty difficult. So a decent handcrafted strategy will beat a computer generated one in a tournament.

[conceit]

Computers can't beat Go, either, not yet, though there's a lot more focus on this.