Apparently there's a real-time strategy AI competition coming up at next week's AIIDE. Unfortunately I didn't find out about this until recently (way past the registration deadline), but I wanted to plug it here since I think this sort of thing is a really fantastic idea. RTS game AI is chock full of really deep and interesting AI problems that have a lot of relevance for just about every other genre of game.
Here's the link:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/orts/AIIDE06/