My professional interest in artifical intelligence and my personal interest as a board game designer/player meet in the field of Computer Game Playing. In an (unfortunally abandoned) open source project I tackled the question how computers could learn to play startegic board games, and which parts of that process could be abstracted and refactored to java libraries.
I came across a similar topic in my job in 2007 when I had to teach an animated character how to play poker for the AI Poker prototype. I chose brute force, and it worked quite nicely.