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Not an MMO, but MindRover was a game completely around building bots and sending them to fight each other. There also were contests were you sent in your bot for competing against others on a manufacturer hosted machine.

And the grand father of such games, of course, was "Core Wars", without any fancy 3d-graphics.

VBA? Office? Two words: core wars. http://www.corewars.org/inform..., Kids are tenacious, curious, and smart. With an hour of instruction the apt will learn more about programming in an afternoon than they will in a month screwing around with Windows.

For those with a taste for low level and retro:

Corewars

FAQ

core wars 2013

You're possibly thinking about the classic corewars game?

http://www.corewars.org/

Yes, I was going to go on to make the point that once you have everyone cheating, it's no longer a human-directed game—unlike the intricate art of the tool-assisted speed run, which is basically a mission to explore the best possible playtime assuming perfect luck and skill, or reliving an old classic (I'm a strong proponent of the five-second rewind in ZSNES myself), a multiplayer game boils down into a pure struggle of code-versus-code. Suddenly, the arms race evolves into a 3D version of Core Wars played with other people's algorithms, a fabulously boring thing to watch if you don't intimately understand what the agents are doing and why.

Agreed, any puzzle game is lame compared to the puzzles we face when programming.

To contribute anecdotal information, it seems that programmers (sample size: one, me) love racing games and NetHack (actually a very big puzzle but so varied that it's hard to think of it as such). They spent some time playing sokoban, a much smaller puzzle. They rarely play programming related games with the exception of Core Wars back in the '80s. They think Rubik's Cube is cool but can't remember anymore the solution studied on a magazine 20+ years ago and they disdain sudoku. You don't play sudoku, that's computer work. If you really have to mess with it you program a computer to solve it (but it's NP-Complete).

A.K. Dewdney came up with a similar idea back in 1984. It's called corewars.

Its corewars, but with real money instead of simulated computer memory.

http://www.corewars.org/

The name of the game is to send a "signal" that confuses the other guys bots, such that you fool them into making you money.

Very much like aircraft radar guided missiles vs radar jammers vs anti-jamming missiles

Are you implying there's a computer game that's completely unhackable?

Core Wars?

A better parallel is Internet Core Wars

Ok, what did this study teach us that wasn't learned years ago in (for example) Boids (1987), Core War (1984), and Tierra (1991)? I mean, it's cool having little bots running around a tabletop and all, but I was simulating the same behaviors on my '286 back in the mid 90's.

They would be competing against each other for the existing resources (petri dish space, the nutrients available, the warmest darkest place of the container).

Each bacterium will have random transcription errors. If these are fatal, the descendant won't reproduce. They have the trade-off between reproducing slowly with fewer mutations but being outbred, or reproducing quickly with more mutations and less chance of being outbred. So it looks like breeding quickly and risking genetic mutations is the better option.

Imagine playing Core Wars where every process that forked or spawned, ran the risk of a few bits being randomized.

I didn't read Scientific American in the 60's, but I do remember an article about "Core Wars", which dates back to 1984. Page images of the article can now be found at http://www.corewars.org/sciam/. There are actually Core Wars leagues online still.

Core Wars!!!

http://www.corewars.org/

(ah... I had too much fun with this "game" back in the 90s)

You mean...Core Wars?!

Cheers,
Ian

My favorite is writing text editors and calculators.

Some things that are more fun to write and play with are cellular automata. Start with implementing John Conway's life, and then try changing the rules or extending it into 3-D.

Another fun one is CoreWars (http://www.corewars.org/). It requires that you write a machine emulator that executes code in a small (~10ish) instruction assembly language with maybe 4 addressing modes and the option to split your program into multiple threads. You also have to write an assembler (or run your emulator as an interpreter), and back in the day you also had to write your own program editor. It's also nice, but not critical, to have a graphical display. I haven't kept up with the current specification, but it wasn't too hard to implement the original spec, and it then gives you a simple assembler playground to mess around in, too.

so your work systems (well, if it wasn't a joke post) are kind of a real life corewar arena.

present: yes
design capacity: 53280 mWh
last full capacity: 51970 mWh
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 11100 mV
design capacity warning: 3000 mWh
design capacity low: 1000 mWh
capacity granularity 1: 200 mWh
capacity granularity 2: 200 mWh
model number: DELL C26035
serial number: 15188
battery type: LION
OEM info: Sony

present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charged
present rate: unknown
remaining capacity: 53280 mWh
present voltage: 12536 mV

This has been done before, it's been around since at least the mid 1980's possibly earlier - it was caleld Core Wars. This evolved into another similar more advanced version called CRobots... Short programs are written to "attack" the other by overwriting the other's memory space. They must alternate between "defending" their own space and "attacking" the other guys's... First to blow stack loses!

Here's some links:

Corewars:

Home Page

Source Forge Page

CRobots:

CRobots Home Page

sounds like that programming game.

Core Wars? Fun game concept though.

Next: All-Star Core Wars ....

Corewars

and

More Core Wars


and

Even More Core Wars


Okay, not virii - but still programs that kill each other are kinda cool :-)

Whats more is people are evolving these little programs to be better.

Oh they have a newsgroup too.( google alt.rec.corewar )


/op

Real men play Core Wars and learn assembly. This does beat learning Java in Prof. Thronton's ICS 22 class tho. :-)