This was my read as well. It seems that Mana simply found a strategy that the AI had not found. Due to not having trained against it, the AI produced nonsense results. The commentators noted that the obvious response was to build a Pheonix and just completely shut down the harassment. The situation is similar to Alpha Go vs Lee Sedol match 4.
One of the hardest parts about these kinds of human vs ai expositions is making sure the AI has explored the full possibility space, so that can handle all situations. The techniques at play lack the ability to perceive a completely new situation and formulate a good response. (Though anyone who's lost to cheese in games they later learned easy counters for know that humans, while better than state of the art AI, aren't perfect here either.)
Mana got himself in the same situation where he was surrounded by stalkers on multiple sides, but this time the micro wasn’t so crazy that he couldn’t manage it, and he was able to take on one group at a time.
The immortal drop, while unanswered, was not really that effectual.
But it was answered: AlphaStar pulled a huge stalker army that was about to hit MaNa's base all the way back home to (attempt to) answer the drop, repeatedly. If you have more complexity to your army but fewer army units, as MaNa did, a delay like that is how you win the game.
That's what I said on Lobsters. They were always good at builds, micro's, etc. The one thing they couldn't do was judge human intent, esp if they were being mislead (esp time wasting). I was waiting for one of the players to try to screw with its head to see what it did. Mana showed two gaps: the back and forth thing; that it ignored the observers giving up constant strategy information. Then, he got the first win.
Now, the questions are how many more such glitches will show up and can they eliminate them with better algorithms?
And against human players up to Masters 3 or so :) When you're still using the all-army hotkey, defending with a small and precise group isn't happening.
That time, the ai didn’t really even try to engage. In fact, the ending of the match was marked by the entirely absent group of stalkers as the natural was engaged.
It’s likely safer to say the AI was confused in general at that point, possibly related to the camera change, but we didn’t really get to see the quality of stalker micro that game
"possibly related to the camera change, but we didn’t really get to see the quality of stalker micro that game "
In software, changes in assumptions can break what depended on them. There could be many assumptions in its neural net centered on full visibility. They should probably retrain all or just some from scratch with the camera change in from the beginning to see what happens. Then, it will be firmly encoded into the strategies over time.
The immortal drop let him keep AlphaStar occupied while he built up a critical mass of immortals (it becomes harder and harder to effectively micro stalkers against immortals as numbers go up, probably even for an AI), then let him put AlphaStar in an awkward position when it was camping near where the warp prism was hiding.
One of the hardest parts about these kinds of human vs ai expositions is making sure the AI has explored the full possibility space, so that can handle all situations. The techniques at play lack the ability to perceive a completely new situation and formulate a good response. (Though anyone who's lost to cheese in games they later learned easy counters for know that humans, while better than state of the art AI, aren't perfect here either.)