Posted something on Project Distributor to keep Darren quiet ;-) Introducing Squirrel .NET!
Well, I talked about it here An old programming contest reborn: Programmer of the Month (1993-2000) and nobody ever seems to drop a comment when they find something interesting (perhaps the readership is getting thin, since I have noticed the counts going down). With that in mind I figured I'd spend a good hard 30 minutes of my time to make Squirrel .NET a reality, at least from a very hobbyist bare-bones point of view.
You'll be able to read about it from Games4Dotnet. Or you can head right on over to the Project Distributor website.
The full source is available, so you should be able to handle writing an AI to play the game. The current scheme for submitting results will be to download a game board, create a series of moves, then submit those moves to the server. The server will then validate and log the number of moves you took in order to achieve your goal.
Before I get inundated with questions... Yes, you can take as long as you want to formulate your response, including exhaustive algorithms that try every possible route to reach the end. No, I'm not storing the routes, so if there is some magical business solution I won't capture it and you don't have to worry about giving away government secrets or anything. All of the code is run on your end so you don't have to worry about others copying your algorithm, since the most they could ever see (or the most the server sees at least) is the output from your algorithm. I'll be formulating some possible ways of winning if anyone is interested in maybe doing a $3-5 entry fee and then taking the pot. I think I have enough clout on Paypal to do something simple like that.