I'm not the one you ask for, but I too created a programming game. I thought you might be interested: I used Lua to sandbox the players code. My game allows updating of code during the game is running. The game is split into client/server and it provides a SDL client that can connect to a running game server to show the current state of the game. Players interface with the server using a tcp connection.

http://infon.dividuum.de/

The Google AI challenges had the bots communicate over stdin and stdout with the game server meaning they could be programmed in any language.

I'll post to link to it on HN probably tomorrow (theoretically will be finished then...).

The main difference is you write the AI for one of your units, but that AI is applied to many units, so you must write an AI that can interact with itself.

Why don't you white-list imports? Bare python is to my knowledge pretty safe. simply block all imports short of the ones you know wont cause a security risk.

edit: never mind, just read your security section. I obviously don't know python.