Brilliant - thanks - I'll check that out.

I do know that hill-climbing isn't always the best strategy - I've got experience. What I'm lacking is knowledge of people from other disciplines doing things in an organised and more complete manner. This is a good start.

I've also found AIMA stuff on Google - http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/ - which claimsto be a Python implementation of algorithms from Russell and Norvig's 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'