Let me clarify what I'm asking through an example:
Artificial Intelligence in videogames has failed to develop in any meaningful way over the past two decades, at least as far as the typical end-user is concerned, and nowhere is this more apparent than in strategy games. Whether we're talking about the 90's or today, AI opponents typically have to receive significant cheats in order to provide a challenging experience for the player. This is widely considered undesirable, can harm immersion or a sense of fair-play, and leads to the concept of "cheesing" the AI (exploiting obvious weaknesses in the AI logic, something which is sometimes necessary if an AI receives such strong bonuses that any strategy you might attempt against another human player would be impossible to execute successfully). This seems to be more an issue with budget than technology as occasionally more competitive AI will crop up by teams particularly dedicated to it (for example, Stellaris' AI is considered unusually good for a grand strategy game, but this has only recently been achieved after many years of post-release development), but it seems most studios do not consider it worth the effort and and will even redesign game mechanics around the limitations of the AI rather than invest more in helping the AI overcome its biggest challenges (the Total War series is a good example of this).
A few years back, Alpha Star came out and revealed that a cutting-edge neural network could stand toe-to-toe against human pros in Starcraft II, even with (and this is important) its actions-per-minute capped to a reasonable level proving that it was competing through strategy rather than simply being able to give commands at a superhuman speed as is typical of "dumb" AI. I'm sure that just about any strategy game today could be similarly mastered by a similar neural network, but that doesn't really help anything since the average gamer certainly doesn't have access to a computer as powerful as Deep Blue to play games with (although there is the ever-growing access to cloud-based AI to consider...).
So this brings me back to my question: could something like Alpha Star be designed for the task of not exactly mastering gameplay itself with all the resources at its disposal, but instead growing a generative algorithm that is designed to play a game as effectively as possible while running on common consumer hardware? I mean, of course it's possible, but I guess what I'm really asking is could it do it more efficiently than a team of AI programmers from both a time and production cost perspective? If so, I could imagine such a technology revolutionizing strategy gaming, and maybe much more besides...
I bring this up because I'm studying computer science with the end-goal of getting into machine learning, and I'm fascinated by this as a sort of project idea, and just wanted to hear the opinions of others more knowledgeable than myself.
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