What I'm saying is that while AI challenge would be nice for some of us it won't be for others. Since making of even easy AI requires good knowlege of programing and understanding how computers are processing information it would be quite hard for a newbie programers to do anything useful.
You need to understand something. The best way for us as comunity to atract new members is to organize this kind of challenges so that everyone has atleast a decent chance of sucsseding.
I myself have now been learning of pascal programing for about 10 years and I still have quite a lot of problems designing AI for one of my games (making proper decision to chose which goods to buy and where to sell them, deciding how planetary colonies eveolve, etc).