The Grand Challenge teams didn't go from zero to victory in one year. They also weren't one-man efforts.
That having been said, and this is a reply to RobinZ also, for more specifics you really want to talk to someone who has written a real-time strategy game AI, or at least worked in the games industry. I recommend doing a search for articles or blog posts written by people with such experience. I also recommend getting hold of some existing game AI code to look at. (You won't be copying the code, but just to get a feel for how things are done.) Not chess or Go, those use completely different techniques. Real-time strategy games would be ideal, but failing that, first-person shooters or turn-based strategy games - I know there are several of the latter at least available as open source.
Oh, and Johnicholas gives good advice, it's worth following.
The Grand Challenge teams didn't go from zero to victory in one year.
Stanford's team did.
They also weren't one-man efforts.
Neither is mine.
I do not believe I can learn much from existing RTS AIs because their goal is entertaining the player instead of winning. In fact, I've never met an AI that I can't beat after a few days of practice. They're all the same: build a base and repeatedly throw groups of units at the enemy's defensive line until run out of resources, mindlessly following the same predictable route each time. This is true for all of Com...
ITT we talk about whatever.