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.
I wonder if a more advanced version could be used as a bug finding tool for modern games.
I love that idea! What seem to us to be implausible, to the code it looks like nothing other than a legitimate strategy.
The issue for modern games is the amount of memory used.