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Core War

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Re: Core War

#31

Post by remram »

sterlind wrote: post #24

What 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.

Because you are time-sharing, there is a strong disincentive to writing complex (long loop) programs. You have to scan for enemy programs, and throughput is important there. So unfortunately it doesn't get very deep.

I suppose you could make it more interesting by battling it out on real systems, a mix of Core War and CTF if you like.

Fortunately there are other programming games such as Robocode, Screeps, yare.io, etc.

Re: Core War

#32

Post by gowld »

sterlind wrote: post #24

What 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.

> rock-paper-scissors equilibria

is only a crude approximation.

Re: Core War

#33

Post by js8 »

sterlind wrote: post #24

What 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, different memory nodes harder/easier to access like a queue, extra hardware gadgets you can take over like TIS-1000 nodes)

- Game progression (research side quests to get additional special HW, at either one-time resource cost or via special task like guessing a password, deciding NP complete instance..)

- Additional game goal types (capture the flag, first to finish computing a neutral program wins)

Just a few. The game concept has a lot of potential.

Re: Core War

#34

Post by gowld »

minitoar wrote: post #12
banana_giraffe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it works. However, the site is .. odd. I'm not sure what triggers it, but if I visit the page from a link on the site, it works, but if I visit that link from your link, it doesn't. Except now, now they both work. Some odd caching artifact? Not sure.

I found that clicking the "play" link at the top made a difference? Pretty weird.

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Re: Core War

#35

Post by ionchannel »

I 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?

Re: Core War

#36

Post by RHSeeger »

zorkian wrote: post #29

Core Wars was great! I spent a good amount of time in the late 90s writing little bots for a similar game, AT-Robots, where you write an assembly type language to program a little laser-shooting robot that could drive around, scan for enemies, etc. http://necrobones.com/atrobots/ And my best robot: http://necrobones.com/pub/atrobots/robots/unlocked/mj6.at2 Anyway, I loved this kind of thing as a teenager. I felt it r…

There was a fun PC game called Omega [1] where you earned resources to build a tank and then programmed it to win combat; which earned you more resources. It was a great game. It had it's own programming language, iirc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_(video_game)

Re: Core War

#37

Post by swayvil »

anyfoo wrote: post #16
swayvil wrote: post #15

The first question on my mind : is it feasible to translate redcode to regular assembly? Take last year's winners. Translate. Profit.

What do you mean, "profit" how? Regular assembly works in a very different environment, and the code is much less constrained (and more low level). Even if your goal is to just crash/overwrite some other code in the same address space, you don't really need to employ any of the core war strategies, and the code you target also won't "fight back".

No post body was provided.

Re: Core War

#38

Post by mmahemoff »

Can 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?

Re: Core War

#39

Post by pacaro »

nmstoker wrote: post #7

I remember reading about a version of this for the BBC Micro called RAM Wars which was published in Micro User in 1988. Tracked down details here: https://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=14334 It's basically the same game, including referring to Redcode and running it in MARS. Apparently there was an earlier BBC port that seems closer to the original game in 1985, predating RAM Wars.

I have a copy of that issue of Micro User gathering dust somewhere! But I remembered that they called it "redcode"

Re: Core War

#40

Post by rklaehn »

sterlind wrote: post #24

What 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 something that worked well.

Recently I wrote a "cellular automaton with provenance" thing. Basically game of life, but you track the originator of each cell. That is fun, but also does not lead to a good game as far as I can see.

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