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RobotWar lives![1] Yay! I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/ Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned

RobotWar lives![1] Yay! I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/ Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. Never heard of Faas Wars but now I'm excited to see what it is like. These programming-based games are way more fun, IMHO, than hackathons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar [2] http://corewars.org/ http://corewars.org/

someguyorother 5y ago
> Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. I wonder if one could make a better ML system than genetic programming for creating CoreWar warriors. Perhaps a neural net connected to a differentiable SAT solver?
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much./ In fact, it's been about 12 years since I last played around with CoreWars, so I'm not up on the newest theories. It would be interesting to see how a genetic algorithm fares against current ML strategies. I'm completely in the dark as to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero work, I only know classifiers/SSD/autoencoders. Would be fun to learn with this environment tho.
  - someguyorother 5y ago
    > That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much. It's simply the combinatorial explosion: it's easier to find a surprising and good program in ten lines with pointers limited to a max value of 800, than with hundred lines and a pointer max value of 8000.
ralphc 5y ago
Mid-80s there was crobots, you programmed the robots with a subset of C.

someguyorother 5y ago

> Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. I wonder if one could make a better ML system than genetic programming for creating CoreWar warriors. Perhaps a neural net connected to a differentiable SAT solver?

SavantIdiot 5y ago
> The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much./ In fact, it's been about 12 years since I last played around with CoreWars, so I'm not up on the newest theories. It would be interesting to see how a genetic algorithm fares against current ML strategies. I'm completely in the dark as to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero work, I only know classifiers/SSD/autoencoders. Would be fun to learn with this environment tho.
- someguyorother 5y ago
  > That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much. It's simply the combinatorial explosion: it's easier to find a surprising and good program in ten lines with pointers limited to a max value of 800, than with hundred lines and a pointer max value of 8000.

ralphc 5y ago

Mid-80s there was crobots, you programmed the robots with a subset of C.