Could the AI participate in ranked matches?

Having a few AI players in there would be really interesting, in order to see how it matches up against human players. This would be really helpful for new players to judge whether practicing against an AI could be some sort of preparation to get used to gameplay on a ranked ladder.

I don't see any room for abuse, once people know the trick to beating the AI its rating would simply plummet and the problem remedy itself.

It can't do any harm and it would be interesting to see what happens, so I don't see why not.

A generalization and a matter of taste. No arguments. Ergo: Nice that you have an opinion, but it doesn't matter at all.

There's an interesting Idea here, and I doubt it would be a serious enough impact on the ladder to impact standings.

I wonder if there is a way to partially incorporate genetic algorithms into this design. Suppose 20 AIs were unleashed upon the ladder, all with slightly different parameters, or different applications of set strategies. Every week, the bottom 10 AIs are removed, and a new 10 are generated by mixing parameters from top 10 AIs with a small amount of random mutation of parameters. In theory, over a large enough number of games, you may be able to evolve better AIs for future patches or versions of the game.

Of course genetic algorithms typically need a LOT of generations to optimise, and it might be difficult to create a modifiable parameter set that could easily be mixed and mutated for the AIs (the AI DNA, if you will). Still, i would be interested in the opinion of someone who knows alot about AI on these matters.

Related on the matter from another thread:

The number of games that the AI played in that game is in the number of thousands. And that was a "simple" tower defence game. An RTS where units can move wherever they want is much more complex.
Letting the AI evolve through evolution is a slow process requiring thousands of games of trial and error.

Letting the AIs evolve through playing thousands of games against eachother sounds valid and pitting the best of them on the ladder could be interesting but letting the AI evolve without a framework of rules and neural networks would probably require too many iterations/games to be feasible for online games.

I'd like the AI to show up as AI on the ladder, but not as AI in-game. That way people can compare their progress vs the AI and have an understand of where they would fall on the ladder at a glance instead of getting their teeth pounded in during a few matches and feeling like their efforts are meaningless.