what about DarwinBots?
anyone tried that?
The programs evolve too.
The Carnage Heart series for the PS1 has a similar scope to Core Wars, except the programming is done graphically and is used to run robots which battle in various environments.
It’s one of those games that I was amazed was ever released, high critical regard but absolutely zero mainstream appeal. I’d really like the new PSP version to be ported to English sometime soon though 
Dr. Ofria at Michigan State University runs the DevoLab ( http://devolab.cse.msu.edu/ ). His introduction to the lab begins with a story about Core Wars and how the best programs often 1) copy themselves and 2) copy themselves, but not perfectly, leaving slight mutations.
The lab is now dedicated to studying the mechanics of evolution in swarms digital organisms which compete for resources and space.
I was happy to see Core Wars pop up again. Thanks.
Thanks a lot for this blog entry and the links. I didn’t know Core War was actually still around.
I became interested in Core War while reading the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons which has some rather interesting ideas growing out of Core War and Tierra, the research of Tom Ray, a biologist (!). Incidentally, I highly recommend the books. One of the coolest far-future epics ever written.
Interesting blog! I wonder if there might be real world applications for such programs?
P.S. I hope the new look is just a fad or a passing bout of angst.
Jeff, I vote on leaving the April 01 stylesheet as an alternate on the site
I vaguely remember playing that when the apparent killer app (won like 95% of the battles for me) was a simple “MOV current current+1”. It would just copy this single instruction into the next memory slot, which it then would move on to, only to repeat, etc. How did they fix that ?
I’m going to have to give this one a shot, I’ve been playing RoboCom (http://www.cyty.com/robocom/) which is very similar in concept and highly addictive. It’s hard to explain without just watching a sample round but it seems to be a great combination of Code War and Robocode, with “robots” infecting other “robots” with software viruses, replicating, or even just reprogramming the others to work for them. It’s great fun!
Another pair of programming games that are very entertaining: AT-Robots (http://necrobones.com/atrobots/) uses an assembly style language and lets you control a single tank against a field of competitors.
The best programming game, IMHO, is Grobots (http://grobots.sf.net). Pronounced Grow-bots, this adds some very different aspects to the programming game genre. First is food, you need to obtain it to have enough energy to run. Second is reproduction, the robots (or cells is a better description) can make more robots. Its no longer about a single unit, but controlling an entire colony of robots. Very challenging, very fun. Uses a forth based language.
These competitions sound like a lot of fun.
Thank you!
@Shaun Austin: Thanks for the CSS refresh tip. Worked like a charm! I can actually read the posts here.
I know this is off topic, but I’ve got to beg you to change your site design back to something more readable. My eyesight is not up to reading this greed on black and I think it will put other people off too. I will not be reading this site on this design because it is far too much strain, but I hope ikt goes back to something easier to read soon.
jeff, how are you doing the server side caching for this site? even though i set my browsers to check new content on every visit, i still have to hit ctrl+f5 to see new comments, or visual changes.
Indulge me, I do not understand how this wins the game:
MOV current current+1
It seems like it will turn all the other users into bots that do the same thing as yours, but never cause the other programs to execute an illegal instruction.
It seems like it would fill the memory space up with instructions that were all legal, leading to a stalemate.
To all who oooh-and-aaah about real world uses of CoreWar, just a quick reminder: viruses, worms and trojans are a “social” form of corewar programs. We need more of those. Maybe the dudes at Microsoft should wrap their mind around the idea too. We might get fewer security holes.
CoreWar is a great pursuit. Its exploitation in the real world isn’t.
The main idea behind writing core war programs is to write code that can modify itself and remain functional. By “functional”, I mean it needs to “bomb” other code and stop it from executing and “bombing”. Whoever kills other program(s) first, wins.
Self-modifying code, anyone? VB crowd? I thought so.
Now I want to write a program to display a picture of Tina Turner.
I remember a more intensive game also called “Core Wars”. Basically, you set up a LAN with one machine for each player, and all that was installed on each was a bare bones OS, and network. The OS was agreed upon by all players, and all have the exact same OS, version etc. (could be UNIX/Linux, Windows, VMS, etc.) No security of any type was set up on any machines. The network was local only. No outside connection. The object of the game was to crash or cripple your opponents machines, while setting up your defenses (system security, firewalls and so on), but you aren’t allowed to take yourself off the network. You had to plan your strategies well in order to hit your opponents while their security was down, and minimize the risk to your system enough for you to carry out quick attacks. Last machines standing WITH a network connection went to the next round.
There was usually one machine set up as a monitoring station, which had full security to prevent it from being taken down. Any players machine that failed to respond to the monitor was considered killed.
A variation was to have another box set up as a network server (with or without security, depending on player prefs). The server would contain various software goodies that could be used to augment your security, or more sophisticated attack software to use as weapons. Players could also take down the storage server to prevent opponents from getting the bonus software.
That’s the “Core Wars” I remember, but I have never seen it mentioned anywhere. Does anybody else remember this?
Thanks
I like the green on black text, I read some stuff that said it is supposed to be easier on the eyes.
How do I get it back?