I want to try out some AI programming in a game, but as I have no experience in the field need a very simple game so that I can program the engine easily and not have it get in the way of my attempts at AI. Does anybody who has perhaps studied AI programming in the past have a suggestion of such a game? I was thinking maybe checkers or connect 4.

I found that Connect 4 was a good game (with very simple rules) to implement a rudimentary
alpha-beta search on.

haha ok alpha-beta search...dont even know what that is, but I've bought a book so hopefully I will soon

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic