What does "understand" mean? Do you understand the game if you know what all the units do, their hitpoints and attack values, how to build them etc.? Do you understand the game if you build a model in your head of the current state of the game and use it to try and predict what moves give you the best chance of winning? If so then it's probably fair to say that any decent AI "understands" the game on some level.

Or is "understanding" an attribute which is only afforded to humans who do these things, much like a machine can process the same inputs in the same ways as a human but will probably never be considered to have 'qualia'?

I think you bring up a good point. People imprint their own perception of things to this AI game. The bot is probably working like other deep learning machine learning things. It runs some models or whatever and tries to minimize error. Not surprising really that the computer thinks differently than humans. A worker rush sounds hilarious to us but hey it can work.

It doesn't sound hilarious to a Starcraft player. It's a very common strategy in the lower ranks that's very effective against players who panic or don't have good micromanaging skills. Everybody has been beaten by a worker rush at least once.

Except that worker rushes are actually terrible and very easy to beat if you don't panic. the insane AI is easy to panic though.

For a complicated game that lacks a dominant strategy like Starcraft does, the two are the same. You must be able to infer the state of the game given your limited factbase of what’s going on. You must be able to choose the strategy that is most likely to Result in victory.

Using this strategy is objectively bad in that it can be repelled by an opponent almost regardless of their initial strategy.

If deepmind’s goal is to beat the standard Ai, then sure I guess it understands that. But that’s a very different problem from understanding Starcraft, and a much less difficult one at that.

They are still learning. So at some point their AI should explore worker rushes, but also explore how to defend against them.

And once the defense gets good enough, the attack portion of the AI should probably do the worker rushes much less often.

Of course, given that the AI has different constraints in micro-management and attention, and that the game is balanced given human skills, some things that would be totally bonkers to do as a human might work for the AI.