Reddit reviews AI Application Programming (Programming Series)

Game playing is a big topic in AI.

You might find this book interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584504218

What? No, this is for fun. My day-job consists of writing point-of-sale systems for retail, which is way less interesting.

For a starter neural-network project, implement an herbivore-carnivore-plant world where the herbivores and carnivores are driven by simple feed-forward neural networks and that reproduce via cloning w/ mutation (no cross-breeding). It's easy to make a simple 2D grid world and to draw all the things in it as colored boxes, and you can do the clone-and-mutate with feed-forward neural networks directly instead having to make any kind of complicated gene/chromosome system. Start small. :)

I started with the design found in the book AI Application Programming, 2nd Edition but quickly deviated from that one's vision design -- it's too easy for herbivores to always avoid carnivores when they have 360-degree vision. I used SDL to get a simple canvas I could draw on to show the world on-screen.

I recommend mapping a key that toggles drawing the world on-screen (since that slows the program down) -- after watching it for awhile, shut off the drawing and let it run at full speed for hours or days, periodically checking back in on it to see how the organisms are doing and what behaviors have evolved.

Edit: Holy heck, that book I linked to is expensive! It must be out of print or something. Grab a used copy, 'cause there's no way it's worth $80. I bought my copy years ago for very much less than that.