I'm very excited about GB. GVM made working on multiple projects already a lot easier, but dependencies are still a huge pain...
I don't know if GB is the best answer to the problem, but at least it's a big step forward and I'll definitely try it out.
That does look like fun. There are many online programming contests that work similarly to that, and I would recommend starting with one of them.
I'd also add that while everyone suggesting AI resources is helpful, the best thing to do is just jump in and start coding. One of the problems with our formal education system is that it often ends up trying to present solutions to problems before the students actually understand the problems, resulting in students that learn fairly superficial understandings of the solution that the brain naturally ends up garbage-collecting. Just code things for a couple of weeks. You should notice you're sort of hitting a wall around that time. You should notice that you see behaviors in your opponents that you do not currently know how to implement. That is the time to start cracking into the AI texts and learning from those who preceded you, and everything will tend to make total sense why you'd want to do that, instead of being these abstract thoughts floating in space that tend to go in one ear and out the other.
(I am convinced, incidentally, that this is why people can so confidently proclaim the uselessness of a degree in computer science to programming; what is taught is incredibly useful, but trying to jam it in for four years before finally turning you out into the real world to actually encounter the problems you've supposedly been learning the solutions to is a terrible way to go about learning. Take advantage of the ease of just hiking out into the coding wilderness and encountering these problems yourself before trying to learn their solutions. It is something the other engineering disciplines would kill to be able to do!)
"I'd also add that while everyone suggesting AI resources is helpful, the best thing to do is just jump in and start coding."
I'd modify that slightly: skim (an hour per chapter? something like that) one or more comprehensive books (for this subject, Russell and Norvig is good) enough to get some idea what is known, then jump in and hack seriously, then interrupt your hacking when appropriate by going back to study the particularly relevant stuff that you know is already known. Jumping in is good and important, but it tends to be a lot more efficient when you have some idea about the outlines of what has already been worked out for you.
The times I haven't been able to follow this advice --- notably not having physical access to university libraries when I was trying to write a C compiler for a Z-80 as a teen back in the 1980s, hence having no very practical way to learn about existing work on parsers and stuff --- have been better than nothing, interesting and educational but not as efficient as doing stuff when I had a lot of stuff to study as needed.
Incidentally, a similar strategy can be very helpful for formal study of nontrivial subjects, e.g. various college-level engineering courses. Skim the text, and maybe another text from the library too, and/or an online Wikipedia-level survey/tutorial/whatever before the course starts. Then you have a much better chance of seeing how things fit together and of finding ways to clarify things you're puzzled by.
Sounds interesting. But please disable debugging on the live version of your projects or put at least a http basic auth in front of it. Debugging messages are not meant to be seen by everybody - http://babynames.cc/
Thanks vanmount, I will do that. I set that up on my host awhile ago. I'm doing everything locally, but I will get it fixed until I deploy the production site.
