Yes. That’s why cars don’t compete in equestrian events and horses don’t go to F1 races.
This non-controversial surely? You want different events for humans, humans + computers, and just computers.
Notice that self driving cars have separate race events from both horses and human-driven cars.
The other commenter is pointing out how ridiculous it would be for someone to downplay the performance of cars because they did it differently from horses. It doesn't matter if they did it using different methods, that fact that the final outcome was better had world-changing ramifications.
The same applies here. Downplaying AI because it has different strengths or plays by different rules is foolish, because that doesn't matter in the real world. People will choose the option that that leads to the better/faster/cheaper outcome, and that option is quickly becoming AI instead of humans - just like cars quickly became the preferred option over horses. And that is crazy to think about.
Now obviously it's more impressive as they don't have infinite compute and had finite time but the car only has one entry in each race unless we start getting into some anime ass shit with divergent timelines and one of the cars (and some lesser amount of horses) finishing instantly.
To your last point we don't know that this was cheaper since they don't disclose the cost. I would blindly guess a mechanical turk for the same cost would outperform at least today.
That’s how I read it at least - exactly how you put it
"did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?"
Which matters a lot when horses are the fastest land vehicle available. (We're so used to thinking of horses as a quaint and slow mean of transport that maybe we don't realize that for millennia they've been the fastest possible way to get from one place to another.)
Yeah fair. There's also that famous human vs horse race that happens every few years. So far humans keep winning (because it's long distance)