I was actually assuming the input representation would just be a video stream, which (combined with audio) is enough for human players, but looking more into it, it's a lot more than a video feed[1].
It feels a little like cheating, but I guess processing the game UI video feed isn't the interesting part of the problem. Plus, it makes the problem much more accessible to hobbyists who can't afford the GPU cluster required to productively experiment on models that process streams of 1080p video.
Still, in principle, I think modern ML modeling approaches could handle the problem of transforming the video feed into a useful high level state representation. I don't think I misunderstood the OP in that regard at least.
Using just the video feed, the AI would be required to reconstruct an overview of the strategic situation, and then develop a forward strategy on top of that involving individual units. Even for a much simpler game like doom, video-only input is enough for strategies like "see an enemy, target and shoot it as fast as possible".
For an AI to be able to effectively compete in a complex game like SC2, preparing high-level inputs is important. Look at these like shortcuts, heuristic approximations of task that would be hard to represent and train with deep learning. I would guess an implementation would need multiple independent nets for various tasks, combined with heuristics. Then each could be separately trained to do the given task.
It feels a little like cheating, but I guess processing the game UI video feed isn't the interesting part of the problem. Plus, it makes the problem much more accessible to hobbyists who can't afford the GPU cluster required to productively experiment on models that process streams of 1080p video.
Still, in principle, I think modern ML modeling approaches could handle the problem of transforming the video feed into a useful high level state representation. I don't think I misunderstood the OP in that regard at least.
[1] - https://github.com/deepmind/pysc2/blob/master/docs/environme...