When there are 6.8 billion people on the planet chances are that someone has had the same idea as you. The difference usually comes down to who actually pushes forward and implements it.

Back in College for a class there was a basic 2d ship game that you implemented an interface in Java that would control the ship which you could write a simple AI for. The game could then be run in slow mode and see a live show down of all the ship AIs, or it could be run without a graphical component and see who does the best out of 1000 matches.