I would like to build an AI for the following game:

* there are two players on a *M x N* board
* each player can move up/down or left/right
* there are different items on the board
* the player wins who has more items than the other player in as many categories as possible (having more items in one category makes you the winner of this category, the player with more categories wins the game)
* in one turn you can either pick up an item you are standing on or move
* player moves are made at the same time
* two players standing on the same field have a 0.5 pickup chance if both do it

The game ends if one of the following condition is met:

* all the items have been picked up
* there is already a clear winner since one player has has more than half the items of more than half of the categories

I have no idea of AI, but I have taken a machine learning class some time ago.

1. How do I get started on such a problem?
2. Is there a generalization of this problem?