[dlwh]

I'm somewhat familiar with this work. (My advisor talked to the authors some. I could be misrepresenting it a little, but not nearly as much as the article.)

It's not learning to play the whole game. It's learning to cheese (in gaming parlance) the opponent. The strategy it learns is to build a warrior as fast as possible and go and attack the enemy's city. If that fails, it almost always loses. The manual gave it some hint in that direction.