I am just finishing up an Artificial Intelligence course where, as part of the assignments, I was able to program bot in a multi-player environment (BZFlags). What I was able to do was to program the bot to interface with the world and play capture the flag against other bots or even humans.
What I would like to know is, what other environments are out there where I could do the same thing (programming bots for a game or in a specialized environment)?
I was able to do this with BZFlags because they ad an API provided so that I could send commands to my bots and find out information about the world around them.