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How about Core War?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.koth.org/info/akdew...
http://blog.codinghorror.com/c...

For those with a taste for low level and retro:

Corewars

FAQ

Core Wars

The other thing I know of that's vaguely similar to what you're talking about is Angband Borgs.

The corewars site linked to in the story has never been known to be active or complete.

The KOTH server is home to the "pro" hills of which 94NOP is the most active.
The most up-to-date site for info & links is Fizmo's.

There are beginner's hills and others at
SAL hills
Yellow hills

There's also an IRC channel at irc://irc.koth.org#corewars

Ant wars looks interesting - pity the event is over

Here is a very simple introduction for anyone new to the game and interested in playing.

This is a bit of a digression, but I'd like to point out that not only is assembly useful to implement games, it can be a game in itself: 7th anual International Functional Programming Contest, CoreWars (though I don't expect them to displace the market share of UT2004)

-jim

I wonder if many people have used icws94 as a first language?

(For those that have never heard of core wars: the basic idea is you write assembly programs that run in a virtual machine - whichever program has more threads running at the end of a time limit wins. I never got into it, but it looks like fun.)

-jim

I agree with your point in general but evolved warriors are having increasing success in Corewars of late and similar strides can be expected in Gridwars.

For example a recent Redcoder Frenzy round was won by this warrior Wild Equilibria by Dave Hillis.

No, it's not pretty.

Even more impressive an evolved "paper" (self-replicating warrior) made the premier 94nop hill this year albeit with the help of a human coded quickscan.

There's more info re evolving to be had at the Wiki.

The "Pizza" corewar server you link to has long been superceded by the "Pro" (in particular 94nop) hills at KOTH and the beginner (amongst others) Redcode hills

The Winner of the Mega Gridwars 2, Robert Macrae, is one of the Corewar greats.
An example of one of his warriors is Phantasm

The hard-core can generally be found on IRC at irc.koth.org Sundays 7p.m. GMT.

This was the original game, described by A.K. Dewdney in Scientific American back in the 80's. It involved multiple programs battling to control the memory space of a single computer, rather than nodes of a distributed system. You can read Dewdney's articles online at King of the Hill, along with a great deal of other information.

This was the original game, described by A.K. Dewdney in Scientific American back in the 80's. It involved multiple programs battling to control the memory space of a single computer, rather than nodes of a distributed system. You can read Dewdney's articles online at King of the Hill, along with a great deal of other information.

• corewars tourney (like KoTH)
  
• robocode tourney
  
• write tutoring/educational software that could be used by remedial/ESL students, or even for a local elementary school (GPLed, of course -- there isn't near enough GPLed educational software/games out there in the world)
  
• solicit suggestions for projects from the faculty and staff of the school (get on their good side for once, and sharpen your skillz while you're at it)
  
• someone else mentioned a school blog...
  
• Gutenberg Project mirror
  
• Anything that either promotes open source software or gives service to some local group that can use the help
  

So instead of seti@home, just run that as a screensaver and you should have a decent core wars bot in a couple of months. Many good bots to pit him against for evolution too.
:-)

The ongoing King Of The Hill tournament showed signs of a fractal pattern though, imho. Certain strategies would be good and certain would be bad against others. So after a while there was kind of a repeating circle of strategies, like a paper, scissors, stone game.
Now it would be interesting to know how robocode differs in that aspect?

This brings to mind some of those programming games that I was never able to bring myself to get into, even though the interest was there.

Corewars was too arcane (Although the program evolvers are neat, at least in theory), and my simple Robot Battle programs fared rather poorly.

IBM put together a Java-based rip-off of Robot Battle called "Robocode" which I'm looking into, especially since my Java could use some help :)

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

You've got an interesting idea; it's almost like corewar or something. It might actually be interesting to have an all-bot match - pit one set of bots against another. You could almost do a genetic-like breeding of the best bot and/or team of bots.

It looks like CoreWars have graduated to the PC! Now we can have distributed spyware aps/killers duking it out on millions of PCs across the land! But how will we keep score?

This reminds me of the old computer program "Core Wars." My ancient history is horribly rusty, but this whole concept goes back to one of the East Coast heavyweights (MIT? Harvard?) where the programmers would write self-replicating code fragments and set them loose overnight. The code was designed to multiply itself and destroy any other code it found. The winner was the one with the most code at the end of the run.

It lives.

I'm telling you, this could be bigger than Junkyard wars, smackdown, and "Triumph of the Nerds" combined.

I've read a lot of articles about the worth/unworth of playing games. Why must they be so homogenous? Why always the first-person and the third-person shooters? What about the muds, Civilization, and my two favorites for many years, Netrek and Core War. Those games are a diverse set that look nothing like each other. Don't just say "games are great" or "games are mind-numbing." It's like saying "books are bad" because you didn't like the last one that you read. Please consider that a computer is a programmable machine that can perform more than one kind of task.

Motivation is easy, because the concept is cool: killer program written by evil genius lays barrage of numeric bombs. Also, tournaments can be a blast... if they are administered exactly right. After that, there are big problems.

Typically, the innovations in Core War come from an elite group of players who "get it" and have a "clue". These are the heros who invent all of the revolutionary new strategies. Everyone else can only copy to compete. Most redcode programs are highly derived from past accomplishments.

Furthermore, Core War is played differently now than in 1984 when it was introduced by A.K. Dewdney's articles in Scientific American (yes, I had his permission to scan them). Originally, programmers wanted to try intelligent strategies in complex programs (e.g. self-correcting code). However, the tournament winners today are highly-optimized compact codes, usually running in a tight loop. There may be some interesting mathematics in the optimization process; genetic algorithms are sometimes used. However, the assembly code itself is not very algorithmic.

The space of competitive warriors has been thoroughly explored. The best players may still find some new tricks. However, everyone must work harder and harder to discover and implement interesting new ideas. Again, most of the tournament submissions are highly redundant -- they are the few successful strategies that everyone knows about.

Finally, the current resources haven't evolved beyond the original Scientific American articles. My experiences with confused newbies suggest that the current online tutorials are inadequate.

Overall, I doubt that Core War will benefit students much in the long-term.

-- David M. Moore

See King of the Hill for the current state of the game and details. They have a "MARS" engine available for download.

And may the best geek win!

John

Already done -- there should be info at koth.org, including links to downloadable software.