This is impressive. The current approach will work only for games where the whole state is on-screen and planning isn't required. A pure reactive system will work for that. I used to say that a key component of AI that was missing was the ability to get through the next few seconds of life without falling down or bumping into anything. I went through Stanford CS when the top-down logicians were in charge of AI. That…
These low level approaches can do planning, there simply ridiculously inefficient at it. A lot of AI research is focused on the idea that 1 Trillion floating point operations per second on 1,000,000,000 bytes of data is now cheap. Efficiency is simply less important.
"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason — including blind stupidity." — W.A. Wulf