At university we had a contest with programmable tanks. Many wrote elaborate algorithms and tried to find the optimal strategy, but the winner was very crude: It tried to get a little bit more life than its opponent, and if it was ahead it would immediately start spawning threads, until the play server couldn't handle it anymore and crashed -- Winning by default.
I had a similar kind of assignment, using a java system called robocode. I ended up writing a system that could track a tank moving in a static arc, while moving itself, which worked surprisingly well.
