[nkrisc]

By forcing a bot to use a keyboard and mouse, it's no longer so much an AI challenge but an engineering challenge of creating robotic limbs that match human performance, totally unrelated. The two aspects should be separated. Arguably, the AI aspect is far more interesting as it relates to StarCraft.

[obl]

I think the point was mostly to only let the bot have as much information as a player would get on the screen : no omniscient knowledge about the state of every visible unit on the map. You'd probably also want to rate limit the inputs, including changing the viewport position, to something reasonable.

[ygra]

You'd probably end up with a bot that simply rapidly moves the viewport over the whole map over and over again to give commands and see what is there. That's inconveniencing an AI slightly because now things are "seen" with a few frames latency instead of immediately, but I doubt it'd make a difference.

[Scea91]

it might make a massive difference in the complexity of the neural network.

[nkrisc]

Ah, perhaps. However that raises new questions. What do you limit the input to? On par with the best players? Do you just average their APM and minimap navigation abilities? It could work, but I think it would be more interesting to let the AI take advantage of its enhanced ability to scour the map.