Games are mostly based on the skills of the players, so should games be balanced by assuming a human can do what a machine can? Of course not!
A bot can usually make computations way faster and more presice than humans.
Let's say a bot plays against another bot, both with different characters. One character might seem really overpowered compared to the other, but that might only be because the bots can react to certain events thousands of times faster than a human. Without that reaction time the tables might turn and the other character might be clearly stronger.
So how fast should we assume a human can do a given action? How precise should we assume the player is at fast calculations?
I do see a lot of things it can balance, but letting bots learn by themselves with no limitations will definitely not work out well.
You can restrain the bot by emulating human limitations if the goal is to use bots to figure out the game balance.
Add latency. Limit its actions per minute including camera movements and maybe even inertial limitations of input methods.
And even if the bot is not a perfect imitation of a human it still might figure out surprising things that would take human players years of real time to figure out by chance since they can only spend so much time on playing and experimenting.
This approach seems like it would be more useful for bug discovery than game balancing. Actively collecting a slew of performance metrics, similar to how companies like Blizzard already do, would give you a better idea of how to proceed with balance changes because you can review the data as it applies to your actual playerbase and even organize it based on ranking categories to get an idea of how your decisions would affect players at different skill levels.
This was generally my interpretation as well. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft already struggle to balance classes with high skill ceilings for use by both the casual players and the hardcore players while keeping those classes enjoyable for both groups. In some ways you could call that the dev-meta, making a competitively balanced meta game while still offering an appealing level of fun for the various subgroups of the player-base.
> but that might only be because the bots can react to certain events thousands of times faster
AI bots such as this one are usually limited to emit actions every N frames, so they can't possibly react faster even if they can solve the perception problem. There is nothing interesting for AI advancement in competing for the best reflex speed - it's all about strategy.
Games are mostly based on the skills of the players, so should games be balanced by assuming a human can do what a machine can? Of course not!
A bot can usually make computations way faster and more presice than humans.
Let's say a bot plays against another bot, both with different characters. One character might seem really overpowered compared to the other, but that might only be because the bots can react to certain events thousands of times faster than a human. Without that reaction time the tables might turn and the other character might be clearly stronger.
So how fast should we assume a human can do a given action? How precise should we assume the player is at fast calculations?
I do see a lot of things it can balance, but letting bots learn by themselves with no limitations will definitely not work out well.