This probably sounds like a school assignment but I guarantee you, none of my teachers know enough about computers to ask me for such a thing :-(

Being high-school students, everyone in my class (myself included) gets bored easily when teachers ramble about french poetry and whatnot. We started playing four-in-a-row (I even created my own version which has three colours ... but not many people are smart enough to play it, let alone beat me ;-)), but everyone wants to practice at home (yeah, they're mental).

I was asked by some friends to code a game which they could use to play at home so now I want to learn some A.I. techniques. Can anyone tell me where to start reading? Anyone with experience in coding computer opponents for games? I've never done this and wouldn't know where to start.

I know this is gonna rock, and maybe show some of my classmates that programming is more cool than what we learned about integers and document.writeln() in JavaScript last year ... I nearly cried when the teacher raped the art of programming like that!

Thanks in advance,
CBAS