My FIL told me about this at thanksgiving! Said he had a lot of fun with them back in college
Core War
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: Core War
#42Can we consider it a precursor to crowdsourced code competitions? Like the Netflix recommendations contest and Kaggle. Are there any modern equivalents, where people submit code to be run against other submissions?
Every now and then there is one at codegolf.SE's king-of-the-hill tag
Re: Core War
#43What are some ways to make Core War a deeper game? Like to reward more complex warriors, and move away from the rock-paper-scissors equilibria. Sort of like how there's that Wikipedia compression contest that includes the compression algorithm's length in the score to prevent gaming it.
You can look at any RTS and come up with many ideas: - More variety in memory layout (different topologies, hidden caves that can be entered only if you control a location, bots can influence the layout while in game...) - Special instructions that grant special abilities like memory protection, but at a computational or memory cost - More resource types (different executing CPUs with different strengths/weaknesses,…
Screeps comes to mind: https://screeps.com/
Re: Core War
#44What are some ways to make Core War a deeper game? Like to reward more complex warriors, and move away from the rock-paper-scissors equilibria. Sort of like how there's that Wikipedia compression contest that includes the compression algorithm's length in the score to prevent gaming it.
You can look at any RTS and come up with many ideas: - More variety in memory layout (different topologies, hidden caves that can be entered only if you control a location, bots can influence the layout while in game...) - Special instructions that grant special abilities like memory protection, but at a computational or memory cost - More resource types (different executing CPUs with different strengths/weaknesses,…
first to compute a neutral program is a really neat idea. the more RTS-style ideas feel unnatural to bolt onto it, but the requirement to do something useful would be neat.
I can imagine strategies of stealing competing warriors' work or corrupting data.
I wonder if you could do like, ASLR core wars somehow.
also befunge wars would be fun but break me.
Re: Core War
#45Koth is still running for those who want to try - http://www.koth.org/lcgi-bin/current.pl?hill94 shows "Last battle concluded at : Sun Feb 6 01:34:58 UTC 2022" ... Though that also suggests that it isn't run that often either.
It takes a lot of time to write a competitive warrior. I'm thrilled that people are still playing at all.
Re: Core War
#46I came across this game in the late 90s and the impression that I got at the time was that I had missed the boat and the game was essentially "solved" and the best programs were already known. Is this not the case?
It is highly optimized, so it is rare for a completely new strategy to emerge. But it also depends on the mix of other warriors, and you can create different types of environments and challenges.
Re: Core War
#47What are some ways to make Core War a deeper game? Like to reward more complex warriors, and move away from the rock-paper-scissors equilibria. Sort of like how there's that Wikipedia compression contest that includes the compression algorithm's length in the score to prevent gaming it.
I remember as a kid, being annoyed that you get penalised for replicating. This is different to nature, where replicating gives you more "processing power". So I wrote a version where every thread was running at the same speed, but that was always dominated by very simple replicators. Then I tried to figure out how to have an instruction set where all instructions run at the same time. But I could not come up with so…
> I remember as a kid, being annoyed that you get penalised for replicating. This is different to nature, where replicating gives you more "processing power".
Perhaps you can make your idea work with some more real world ideas?
In the real world, you need resources to do anything. You find resources in the environment. Be that water, food or sunlight etc.
In Core Wars processing power is a resource. In standard Core Wars, your side has a fixed supply of resources. Replicating just divides that fixed supply amongst more agents. Somewhat realistic.
You can steal other people's processing power, if you manage to make some of their threads execute your code. (In that weirder sense, replicating in Core Wars can give you more processing power.)
Your idea was to hand out the resource of processing power just in relation to how many times you replicated. You found that's not workable.
Perhaps you could come up with a way to make players earn processing power?
Re: Core War
#48I love (and loved) Core War.
I was maybe 12 or 13 in the late 80s, born and living in a tiny town in central Italy (Assisi), in love with technology and programming, also thanks to an older brother and his Commodore64.
One of his friend, ~10 years older than me, was studying CS in Pisa (one of the best CS universities in Europe, at least back then), but was frequently back home, and I used to visit him and play some videogames with him on his 386 or 486.
At some point he introduced me to Core War. I was instantly hooked, and we started writing "viruses" (that's how we called the programs) and then run tournament to see which one would perform best. I loved programming these things, and the intellectual challenge associated with it.
I am forever thankful to the creators of Core War. I ended up studying CS, moving abroad to work at AWS as a Technology Evangelist (first employee in Europe, back in 2008), and eventually having a rather successful career in IT. Core War deserves part of the gratefulness for all I had in life. BTW, this is the story of how I found my job at Amazon [0].
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
Re: Core War
#49There's a Core War tournament in progress this week, being livestreamed on twitch https://twitch.tv/corewarglobal
Also, there are better quality scans of Dewdney's articles here https://corewar.co.uk/sciam/
Re: Core War
#50Wasn't there variant of this Doug McIlroy won by getting core below attack limit?
Yes, that's Darwin from 1961 https://corewar.co.uk/darwin.htm