> it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s _visible units_ on the map directly
1. While it's true that a human player could see everything the AI is seeing, the human player has to spend time and clicks to go see those things, whereas the AI sees it all simultaneously without having to use any actions or spend any time to take it in.
2. Emphasis on the computer seeing it all simultaneously. The computer can see the state of two health bars on opposite sides of the map at the same time, or 100 healthbars in a hundred places at a time. A human cannot do that, and even trying to move the view around fast enough to do so would render it impossible to actually do anything else.
3. If it's true that seeing more at once is not advantageous, then it must also be true that seeing less at once is not disadvantageous. So by that reasoning a player playing on a 1 inch x 1 inch screen would not have any disadvantage, since after all they're getting just the same amount of information as long as they move the screen around enough! Reducto ad absurdum, a player with a 1 pixel x 1 pixel screen has no disadvantage either, because they have access to the same information as long as they move around quick enough. It quickly becomes evident that smaller screens inhibit your knowledge of the game state, and therefore larger screen benefit your knowledge of the game state.
This might be why changing to having to observe only one screenful at a time (rather than the zoomed out view) didn't seem to have as large an effect.
Similarly, robots are physically stronger than people at any given task you can think of. That's a real advantage of them.
Yes, likely! I wasn't doubting it's possible or even likely. Only that seeing an AI do flawless 1000 APM stalker micro and macroing perfectly, while pretty cool, is not as exciting as seeing an AI use a novel strategy (edit: especially one that a human could theoretically execute)
Starcraft is a single-threaded game, so I would think that the AI ultimately still has to enumerate through each visible unit one-by-one to collect their information. Why is that so much different than enumerating through each visible screen and then enumerating through each unit on that screen? Either way, the AI could do it much faster than a human, whether it had to click through the screens manually or not. How would it be possible to eliminate this advantage? It seems to me that it's just part of the nature of AI.
Let me put it the opposite way: If you gave the human player a real time list of every visible unit on the map and all of their information, such that they didn't have to move the screen around manually and could see everything at a glance just like AlphaStar can, would that take the advantage away from AlphaStar? No, it wouldn't because AlphaStar could still go through all that data much faster than any human ever could -- no matter how it's formatted or what you have to do to access it. To AlphaStar, checking all the visible screens is just as much work as scrolling through a list of units.
EDIT: I guess you would still have to wait for the next frame to get rendered, which could add up. True, that does change things a bit, but of course a computer could still do that way faster than a human.