Falkkin wrote a framework for A simple game AI that learns. You could write packages to have it learn your game. The thread includes some general discussion of AI as well.

(BTW, be careful with the ConnectFour.pm that I wrote using Falkkin's framework. It uses gobs of memory, because I didn't encode the game states compactly. A better encoding was developed in the Chatterbox, but I never got around to posting it.)