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We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

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Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#21

Post by vrperson »

veddox wrote: post #17
pmontra wrote: post #4

> Corewars proved itself really, really hard. Learning the assembly commands and how they edited the A and B values of each memory cell, understanding how the processes were executed and how data was stored was incredibly challenging for students to wrap their heads around. This surprised me. I wrote a Corewars system in compiled Basic for the Sinclair QL when the game became popular. Writing it was not particularly…

> This surprised me. When I read the intro, I was like „They want to teach beginners with Corewars? That‘s brave...“ I really like the idea of Corewars (and programmning games in general), but I never managed to get into it because the whole concept of assembly language was too foreign for me. I would have had to invest too much time up front, just understanding the basics. I loved Robocode, but then that uses Java ;…

Have you tried Human Resource Machine?

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#22

Post by anta40 »

CoreWars is probably the most interesting programming game ever made.

Yes, I've played Zachtronics games like TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Exapunks. No doubt those are super fun addictive games. As a programmer who still ocasionally write assembly code for fun, nothing beats CoreWars, though :)

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#23

Post by segfaultbuserr »

klyrs wrote: post #20
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the most important safety precaution. 0. Get a non-contact voltage tester. Always assume mains wiring is dangerous, unless it has been checked. And always assume the voltage tester is lying to you, unless you've verified it at a known live wire at the beginning of your work. The final event that led to the accident was, > so I figured that if I instead just turn off the lights, then even without flipping t…

Hmmm... this sounds suspiciously close to "good" advice. I'm sure my grandpa would have done a spark test with the shaft of a screwdriver. Personally, I take a radically different approach to household wiring: hire folks who know better than gramps.

I'm not sure why you would think that my suggestion is "suspiciously good". Your suggestions included rubber boot or keeping one hand behind your back, which are what a grandpa would tell you as precautions when working on a potential live circuit. And my suggestion to double check whether a circuit is really dead before working under such a "deadly" assumption is arguably more important.

> Personally, I take a radically different approach to household wiring: hire folks who know better than gramps.

I never suggested otherwise. In a qualified household wiring, all switches are correctly wired, thus turning off a light switch and touching an exposed wire is as safe as turning off the breaker. And there won't be hidden junctions in the walls waiting to be burned up. And a single earth leakage doesn't kill the power of an entire home... - these properties are what you definitely want.

My point is not to assume anything while working on an existing system. I test live voltage even before I replace a lightbulb - you don't have to mess up the entire wiring of your house, a single miswired light socket can be just as dangerous. Fortunately, so far I've never encountered a single case where the light socket is live after opening the light switch, nor a single case where the metal thread of the light socket is live, which gives me confidence that the wiring at my home was probably in compliance. I simply don't assume.

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#24

Post by klyrs »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #23
klyrs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... this sounds suspiciously close to "good" advice. I'm sure my grandpa would have done a spark test with the shaft of a screwdriver. Personally, I take a radically different approach to household wiring: hire folks who know better than gramps.

I'm not sure why you would think that my suggestion is "suspiciously good". Your suggestions included rubber boot or keeping one hand behind your back, which are what a grandpa would tell you as precautions when working on a potential live circuit. And my suggestion to double check whether a circuit is really dead before working under such a "deadly" assumption is arguably more important. > Personally, I take a radic…

> I'm not sure why you would think that my suggestion is "suspiciously good".

With comedic intent. I don't want to give folks the impression that grandpa's advice was good.

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#25

Post by heelix »

klyrs wrote: post #20
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the most important safety precaution. 0. Get a non-contact voltage tester. Always assume mains wiring is dangerous, unless it has been checked. And always assume the voltage tester is lying to you, unless you've verified it at a known live wire at the beginning of your work. The final event that led to the accident was, > so I figured that if I instead just turn off the lights, then even without flipping t…

Hmmm... this sounds suspiciously close to "good" advice. I'm sure my grandpa would have done a spark test with the shaft of a screwdriver. Personally, I take a radically different approach to household wiring: hire folks who know better than gramps.

I remember being in the attic with my Grandfather. He touched a bare wire and said something like 'wooee - That was 220.' I figure I've drawn heavy out of the luck bag already in my life with electricity.

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#26

Post by EvanAnderson »

bemmu wrote: post #6

I injured myself ~20 years ago because of Corewars (well mostly stupidity, but Corewars was involved). I wrote a little evolution routine that would take some corewars code and randomly change instructions around to see if it couldn't evolve a more successful program this way. I let it run for hours and hours, and it did come up with short programs, and I was eager to see how it would continue. It happened that I nee…

I did a similar thing (the evolution of corewars code bit-- not the light fixture bit) after reading Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[1] in the early 90s. The chapter on Tom Ray's Tierra[2] really excited me.

Some people say that reading Richard Dawkins caused them to become atheist. For me, it was very clearly "Artificial Life" and the code I wrote playing around w/ "evolving" Corewars code.

I managed to eek out a little "evolution" in my experimentation. I was never particularly religious to begin with. My simulation code caused me to deeply consider the power of evolution. Here was this tiny change, evolved from randomness in a minuscule virtual "petri dish", out of a tiny amount of ingredients that were brittle and unforgiving of the slightest change, on a time scale that was the smallest fraction of a fraction of the age of the universe.

Observing the sheer magnitude of the chemical "parallel computing substrate" at the scale of atoms and molecules, interacting in real time, across a space as large as the Earth, in a timescale measuring billions of years, and over a wide variety of temperature and energy gradients made me aside any concerns that all life couldn't have arisen from randomness.

I didn't need an "intelligent designer" after that. Nature, the vastness of space, the minuteness of atoms, and the overwhelming scale of time were enough.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#28

Post by Technically »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #13
pmontra wrote: post #4

> Corewars proved itself really, really hard. Learning the assembly commands and how they edited the A and B values of each memory cell, understanding how the processes were executed and how data was stored was incredibly challenging for students to wrap their heads around. This surprised me. I wrote a Corewars system in compiled Basic for the Sinclair QL when the game became popular. Writing it was not particularly…

Maybe. I don't remember there being 30 instructions either though. We need A RISC Core Wars. (Although he did mention a reduced set of commands still took 1.5 hours of hand-holding....)

A RISC ISA would render a lot of tricks useless as they depend on memory-to-memory copies.

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#29

Post by wankeler »

janzer wrote: post #16
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the most important safety precaution. 0. Get a non-contact voltage tester. Always assume mains wiring is dangerous, unless it has been checked. And always assume the voltage tester is lying to you, unless you've verified it at a known live wire at the beginning of your work. The final event that led to the accident was, > so I figured that if I instead just turn off the lights, then even without flipping t…

Also of note is that in some regions it is apparently common to run the power to the fixture itself, then extend down to the switch. Which means there will always be hot wires at the fixture unless the circuit is shut off. My experience with this comes from people who were from the southern US and who found it very weird and even at first insisted it was "wrong" to run the power to the switch then to the fixture. My…

Standard approach in UK too, though power to switch us increasingly common to support smart switches that need a neutral.

Re: We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach Computer Science students in India

#30

Post by aramachandran7 »

Adi here - Thanks all for the advice, comments, support, and tips on ... not getting electrocuted(?)!! It's been a while since I've worked on the Corewars in India project so I'll answer some of your questions the best I can :)

Have been an HN lurker for ~1 year and it's super exciting for my first post to hit the front page! Looking forward to posting more interesting projects in the future!

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