[QuadmasterXLII]

For 2, Codingame's bot programming challenges are excellent. To get high on the leaderboards you need to write super well optimized code and have clever ideas, which is about as fun as a programming challenge gets. To get started, I'd recommend their TRON lightcycle game, which has a great combination of approachable ruleset and deep gameplay.

https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer/bot-programming/line-r...

If you prefer floating point math over integers, their pod racing game is awesome: at one point my algorithm was fourth in the world at it.

https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer/bot-programming/mad-po...

As a bonus, you can use just about any language you want: I know they have at least python, C, c++, rust, Go, Java, javascript, bash...

[ramtatatam]

+1 for CodinGame, I loved their Sprint 2022 challenge (which is now available as multiplayer game). This challenge motivated me to purchase a book about writing intelligent agents and to start studying the subject more in depth.