Purpose: Provide a way to compete in writing game playing algorithms for students.
This is a simple REVERSI game server. It contains an example of writing game-playing AI agent. People can try to write their own playing bot to beat this primitive one.
You can use simple techniques like comparison of single layer. It is acceptable to describe hand-written strategies. Also you can consider the set of key words to read about : contraversal game, minimax, Alpha–beta pruning.
Some good recomendations and reading are available in "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" book by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig and here
Wikipedia contains a lot of good articles from this fiaeld.