Hopefully this will spark some new discussion here!

Recently I got caught up watching this tournament [SSCAI] Student StarCraft AI Tournament 2014

Chat reminded me of past tournaments where a bot written by Berkeley dubbed 'Overmind' played some impressive games with mutalisk micro. ( see Berkeley Overmind )

This got me interested in writing AI for sc:bw. Possibly other games? I've seen a similar tournament format for Dota2, but i don't anything about the programming interface there.

Through a combination of Java/C++ there is BWMirror + BWAPI that provide the functions to control game elements. They also happen to recommend my favorite editor (Eclipse) in their tutorial.

In other news, there was a white paper published through Science magazine about research in hold em' bots with a weak strategy that provides some return.