gomoku ai project

Gomoku AI Project

I want to create a basic AI for the game gomoku/5-in-a-row (simple version). I'll use this blog for taking notes on the progress. You can play it against people on miniclip, it looks like this:

I don't think it should be so difficult to create a simple AI that is better at this game than me, which only takes a few seconds to calculate its moves on my computer. I'm not sure if I will program it in scheme (so that it's easier to write the code) or C (so that I don't have any worries about speed problems being caused by a languages runtime). I think I will use C so that I can manually handle the allocation of boards.
From reading AIMA, I think alpha-beta pruning should work so I'll try that - but first I think I will make a knots-and-crosses/3-in-a-row AI (so that I get the basic stuff like the tools and implementing an interactive board out of the way).