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. 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!)