There has always been the issue of interface when playing videogames AI vs human. Either give the human a brain-computer interface or give the AI a mouse, keyboard, monitor, robot hands and a camera. Anything else seems inherently unfair.
Edit: Note that the version they sent out to the ladder had significant larger delay, significant lower APM, and didn't get any information not visible on the screen unlike the first iteration.
Of course to any reasonable person a consistent 5 ms is obviously vastly superior to once in a blue moon lottery-winning luck.
Sounds like it's the same deal here, where the designers made some effort to level the interface playing field, but also left in some advantages like instantly being able to select individual units (or whatever it was the other players felt was not humanly possible to do). Probably because, at some level, they really want their system to win.
If we have reached the point where to even risk a loss requires implementing artificial restraints on the AI...well...
You aren't really testing the thing you really want to test otherwise.
You could probably play tennis pretty well against Nadal if you made him wear goggles that gave him a quarter second delay in response time, but that's not really a fair test.
All other things being equal, if you match up two chess players, and one can just say or think the position instead of having to physically move the piece before they hit the clock, that advantage will accumulate over time.
It will be a different game, but you can see how AI does against humans tactically and strategically.
Strategy and tactics are a function of constraints. If an unconstrained computer can beat a constrained human, have we really shown that its strategy and tactics are better? To do that, you'd have them to play under the same constraints. Or at least have the constrains be close enough, which is what people are debating.
Any aspect of "fairness" is relevant if and only if it helps that goal. APM limits are important because we want the computer to choose strategies that would actually be good choices in that situation even for a human player, instead of being able to win with strategies that are powerful only because of superhuman clicking speed. On the other hand, requiring the computer to press buttons with a robot hand doesn't really facilitate improvements to the decisionmaking part, so it's irrelevant even if it would make it more fair.
After all, isn’t that the point of AI? To perform better at certain tasks than humans? We are visitors in the digital realm, just like when we put on a scuba suit and jump in the ocean—even the smallest fish can out-swim us.
This current modality is important, IMO, because we could potentially see neural networks performing tasks on other software, not just SC2. Imagine a neural network performing copy-editing in Word, writing code for CRUD applications, etc. Those are some mind-blowing potentials, we'd be losing out if we slowed down to work on robot hands.
AlphaGo had an "unfair" advantage in its games against Lee Sedol in that it was able to "think" far faster than you could reasonably expect a human to, and could therefore evaluate many, many more moves than a human player possibly could have. If you artificially limited the speed at which AlphaGo was able to "think" to match human limitations, would it have been able to win against Lee? I'd argue probably not.
Similarly, here we have an AI that's easily able to crush top SC players if it plays with an uncapped APM and no camera limitations, but only reaches grand master level when you impose artificial restrictions that force it to behave more like a human. The question of which configuration is more "fair" is kinda arbitrary; it depends on what your goal is.
I hope Civ5 could open up its API.
Interesting. But also consider this: in casual strategy videogames -- actually, strike "strategy" and just consider videogames -- most players don't want a really hard opponent. A computer opponent that is really very hard to beat is not what we want, because that'd be frustrating and many of us play videogames (yes, even strategy games!) to unwind; we want the illusion of challenge, an opponent that is challenging to beat but within the possibilities of every person who buys the game.
Which, by the way, is also the case with Starcraft II. Most people who bought it aren't tournament players. They expect a challenge, but not a really hard challenge. Game difficulty is all about perception ;)
PS: I shamefully confess I reloaded my X-COM (DOS!) game every time I lost one of the soldiers I was emotionally attached to. I don't like losing! :P
I don't know whether a more capable non-cheating AI would help though. Not unless it specifically imitated how a (good) human opponent would play, which I guess is an additional and difficult to implement constraint.
When so many player play a game, even an almost irrelevant advantage can tip the scale.
Or maybe it's a sociological factor, not a phisics ones.
But the data doesn't lie.