I might have accidentally downvoted your comment, sorry about that :(

Can you recommend other resources and reading materials other than this? I would like more on top of the provided links thank you. OP's url have got me interested in AI now, but mainly for solving puzzles like this.

Thanks for the +1 jbarrow, appreciate it!

codecombat is awful. Lags a lot, has a bad UI and a lot of bugs.

Now this is brilliant. I was thinking the same thing, "Man I'd like to play as a real person, before I build a bot." I feel silly now that I didn't think of building a software controller like you did. Also thanks for sharing the code. I'm gonna have to try it out.

This doesn't have that magical "coordinate an army" feeling that the Ants contest had. :(

The rules are very simple -- you control a hero, and you fight other heros to capture mines which give you gold. You can trade gold for health in taverns.

Not too much strategic depth.

I share your pain.

This game is fully observable and determinist so that is not the hardest situation. However there is still a lot of possible game states.

I've started an attempt to have a tree of all possible actions and using a minimax algorithm (with a score function + alpha-beta pruning) but this is not yet conclusive because I can't explore so much deep (was able to explore up to 20 next player decisions but that is just 5 moves of your hero).

I think this game is enough simple to try to have this approach but also challenging because there is still up to 5 possible actions per turn so it is a max of 5^1200 total of possible state for a game – a lot.

My current approach is now to try to have a minimax with pre-explored interesting path in the tree (e.g. all path which leads to tavern and mines), that is still a lot of computations.

Best strategy I've seen from watching is to gain mines until you have a sizable portion, stay adjacent to a beer until you see someone you can kill, kill them, then go straight for a beer. If you are constantly using the beer you become invincible for only 2 gold per turn.

From observation, the beer thing's healing looks ridiculously overpowered, to the point where you probably can't fight someone near one

Maybe it's a (row,column) metaphor.

there are starter kits available on the site.

Video game bots have been called "AI" for decades now, it's a little late to dispute the term. The word "AI" doesn't imply "strong AI", there is "weak AI" as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI

Also see the AI effect, where something is called "AI" until we actually solve it or understand it, then it is no longer called AI. "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

AI encompasses various things—simple AIs playing games, more complicated ones acting like humans.

I don't get this. I could easily transcribe anything I could write in a day into a diagrammatic representation. Hell, I could do it for anything I could write given a large enough whiteboard. It might consist of complicated flow diagrams or fragments of mathematics, but it would convey the salient points. This seems like fanatical code worship, "code is the only appropriate representation for all analytic thought". Nonsense. Maths, state diagrams, uml, even prose are useful and in combination adequate languages.