I didn’t realize you intended A3 to refer to future imitation learning systems. In that case, yes, it will work. You might have to use some tricks similar to gwern’s suggestions—e.g. the imitation learner should (for fair comparison) also have access to the simulation platform that AlphaZero uses, and would have to play about as many games as AlphaZero plays. But it does not have to do the same search and policy distillation training process that AlphaZero does.
I didn’t realize you intended A3 to refer to future imitation learning systems. In that case, yes, it will work. You might have to use some tricks similar to gwern’s suggestions—e.g. the imitation learner should (for fair comparison) also have access to the simulation platform that AlphaZero uses, and would have to play about as many games as AlphaZero plays. But it does not have to do the same search and policy distillation training process that AlphaZero does.