5 years ago, I wanted to help the engineers on my team stretch their coding skills by presenting them with an entirely new set of challenges than the typical tedium that can come with building business applications day in and day out. Having built so many games over my own career, one unique element I've always enjoyed is building out the game's AI. After building the core engine, collision detection, and all that - building the AI was always a fun, and very different, challenge. I'd have to think it through: if I was a player, playing this character - what would my own in-game approach be? To be fair, what elements could my AI player see and interact with, and what would they not see, how could I scale my strategy to different difficulty levels. Expressing your strategy in code requires a different line of thinking. It may not directly translate to writing better business or consumer applications, but it stretches your computational thinking and problem solving. Plus it...