8 ms·

Core War

236 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

dang 5y ago
This Jeff Atwood article (via the links below) is nice: https://blog.codinghorror.com/core-war-two-programs-enter-one-program-leaves/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/core-war-two-programs-enter-on... The original Scientific American articles which introduced Core War are at http://www.koth.org/info/akdewdney/ http://www.koth.org/info/akdewdney/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566384, but no comments there). Scans of those articles (via Atwood) can be viewed here: http://www.corewars.org/sciam/ http://www.corewars.org/sciam/ Only a few past discussion: The Core War Game Implemented in C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14442325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14442325 - May 2017 (1 comment) The Halloween Core War Tournament - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8505573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8505573 - Oct 2014 (1 comment) Core War Tournament – Spring 2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7804141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7804141 - May 2014 (11 comments) Two Programs Enter, One Program Leaves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2462535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2462535 - April 2011 (37 comments) Core War: Two Programs Enter, One Program Leaves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153505 - April 2008 (8 comments)
aaron695 5y ago
I remember having to order a copy of the SA article for a small amount of $ (which I didn't have, but didn't not have, kids didn't have money) and a week wait at school from the state library. Different world... (And the hysteria in the 80s/early 90s was this was training for computer virus writers ;) but people also thought computer crime was fun so it wasn't like D&D style hysteria)
rahen 5y ago
Unfortunately corewar.io seems down. I'm not sure what happened to them.
- misslibby 5y ago
  works for me
  - rahen 5y ago
    Does it really? https://www.corewar.io/app/editor/src https://www.corewar.io/app/editor/src
    - banana_giraffe 5y ago
      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.
      - minitoar 5y ago
        I found that clicking the "play" link at the top made a difference? Pretty weird.
        gowld 5y ago
        --------------- Page Not Found Looks like you've followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn't exist on this site. Back to our site If this is your site, and you weren't expecting a 404 for this path, please visit Netlify's "page not found" support guide for troubleshooting tips.
      - ctoth 5y ago
        Sounds like someone's doing something with the Referer header.
    - Msw242 5y ago
      Yeah sometimes I get through. Try refreshing
harles 5y ago
I have fond memories of this being the final challenge of Zebulun[0]. They took a top performing program and gave specific requirements, like creating a vampire pit to trap the other program. [0]: https://www.ca-zeb.com/zebulun/ https://www.ca-zeb.com/zebulun/
nmstoker 5y ago
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 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.
- pacaro 5y ago
  I have a copy of that issue of Micro User gathering dust somewhere! But I remembered that they called it "redcode"
bear8642 5y ago
Wasn't there variant of this Doug McIlroy won by getting core below attack limit?
- impomatic 5y ago
  Yes, that's Darwin from 1961 https://corewar.co.uk/darwin.htm https://corewar.co.uk/darwin.htm
anyfoo 5y ago
Are there any write ups into the details of how, say, the contest winners work? I remember having a few good afternoons of fun with Core War as a teenager back in the day (I probably found an implementation on a shareware/freeware CD). But while that made me understand the tradeoffs of some of the common strategies mentioned on this wiki page pretty well, getting into the (often entirely uncommented) complex red code of some of the winners wasn't something I was too keen on doing without at least some description.
swayvil 5y ago
The first question on my mind : is it feasible to translate redcode to regular assembly? Take last year's winners. Translate. Profit.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  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".
  - charcircuit 5y ago
  - swayvil 5y ago
optimalsolver 5y ago
There's an x86 version: https://shooshx.github.io/corewars8086_js/war/page.html https://shooshx.github.io/corewars8086_js/war/page.html
thom 5y ago
Has anyone created some sort of Core War Zero?
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125.2545&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125... http://borax.polux-hosting.com/madchat/coding/corewars/corewargenetic.pdf http://borax.polux-hosting.com/madchat/coding/corewars/corew... https://ailab.ijs.si/nenad_tomasev/files/2012/07/Tomashev_diplomski.pdf https://ailab.ijs.si/nenad_tomasev/files/2012/07/Tomashev_di...
anugrahit 5y ago
dewdney is a genious, loved reading "The Armchair Universe", " The New Turing Omnibus" while i was in high school, i still go back to re-read, to see his unique fun way of exposition on CS theory
saagarjha 5y ago
Sounds like it would fit right in at a King of the Hill CTF challenge.
andai 5y ago
See also: Darwin (1961). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(programming_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(programming_game)
sterlind 5y ago
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.
- remram 5y ago
  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.
- gowld 5y ago
  > rock-paper-scissors equilibria is only a crude approximation.
- js8 5y ago
  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.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Screeps comes to mind: https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/
anta40 5y ago
Is there implementation that is actively maintained? CoreWar looks like my ideal programming game. Now I'm playing Zachtronic games (TIS100, Shenzen I/O) and occasionally Robocode.
- shagie 5y ago
  https://github.com/akosela/pmars https://github.com/akosela/pmars appears to be one of the more recently built ones. It's a pretty much "finished" application.
dennajort 5y ago
I remember having done a project like that in my CS school. We had to do a compiler from some pseudo asm to the binary opcode supported by the corewar VM, the corewar VM itself (you can call it the arena) and a champion and we would fight champions across teams. Taugh me a lot about opcodes and emulation.
- lelouch11 5y ago
  Is there a resource available online? Would love to try implementing this.
  - dennajort 5y ago
    This is the most complete description I found (I don't have my original one sorry), in french also http://oxyde.free.fr/projets/vm.html http://oxyde.free.fr/projets/vm.html I can provide a list of champions source code (asm) that was provided to test all of that. Also found this project that looks quite complete https://github.com/ClementBolin/Corewar_Epitech https://github.com/ClementBolin/Corewar_Epitech
shagie 5y ago
Koth is still running for those who want to try - http://www.koth.org/lcgi-bin/current.pl?hill94 http://www.koth.org/lcgi-bin/current.pl?hill94 shows "Last battle concluded at : Sun Feb 6 01:34:58 UTC 2022" ... Though that also suggests that it isn't run that often either.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  It takes a lot of time to write a competitive warrior. I'm thrilled that people are still playing at all.
- Doxin 5y ago
  AFAIK it runs when you submit a warrior, Of course these days that's not super frequent, but it's not like you need to wait days after submitting a warrior either.
zorkian 5y ago
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/ http://necrobones.com/atrobots/ And my best robot: http://necrobones.com/pub/atrobots/robots/unlocked/mj6.at2 http://necrobones.com/pub/atrobots/robots/unlocked/mj6.at2 Anyway, I loved this kind of thing as a teenager. I felt it really helped me to fall in love with programming and the ability to make things happen by writing code.
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_(video_game)
ionchannel 5y ago
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?
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  It is highly optimized, so it is rare for a completely new strategy to emerge. But it also depends on the mix of other warriors, and you can create different types of environments and challenges.
- Doxin 5y ago
  It's definitely not solved yet. The various king of the hill servers are still ever changing. I figure it's a rock-paper-scissors type thing: there's no one ultimate best solution. That said, the warriors have gotten crazy good so getting a spot in the top 10 is very hard.
mmahemoff 5y ago
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?
- NieDzejkob 5y ago
  Every now and then there is one at codegolf.SE's king-of-the-hill tag
cwyptocuwency 5y ago
My FIL told me about this at thanksgiving! Said he had a lot of fun with them back in college
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
I love (and loved) Core War. I was maybe 12 or 13 in the late 80s, born and living in a tiny town in central Italy (Assisi), in love with technology and programming, also thanks to an older brother and his Commodore64. One of his friend, ~10 years older than me, was studying CS in Pisa (one of the best CS universities in Europe, at least back then), but was frequently back home, and I used to visit him and play some videogames with him on his 386 or 486. At some point he introduced me to Core War. I was instantly hooked, and we started writing "viruses" (that's how we called the programs) and then run tournament to see which one would perform best. I loved programming these things, and the intellectual challenge associated with it. I am forever thankful to the creators of Core War. I ended up studying CS, moving abroad to work at AWS as a Technology Evangelist (first employee in Europe, back in 2008), and eventually having a rather successful career in IT. Core War deserves part of the gratefulness for all I had in life. BTW, this is the story of how I found my job at Amazon [0]. [0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-314ee8634da9 https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
impomatic 5y ago
There's a Core War tournament in progress this week, being livestreamed on twitch https://twitch.tv/corewarglobal https://twitch.tv/corewarglobal Also, there are better quality scans of Dewdney's articles here https://corewar.co.uk/sciam/ https://corewar.co.uk/sciam/

236 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

dang 5y ago

This Jeff Atwood article (via the links below) is nice: https://blog.codinghorror.com/core-war-two-programs-enter-one-program-leaves/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/core-war-two-programs-enter-on... The original Scientific American articles which introduced Core War are at http://www.koth.org/info/akdewdney/ http://www.koth.org/info/akdewdney/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566384, but no comments there). Scans of those articles (via Atwood) can be viewed here: http://www.corewars.org/sciam/ http://www.corewars.org/sciam/ Only a few past discussion: The Core War Game Implemented in C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14442325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14442325 - May 2017 (1 comment) The Halloween Core War Tournament - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8505573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8505573 - Oct 2014 (1 comment) Core War Tournament – Spring 2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7804141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7804141 - May 2014 (11 comments) Two Programs Enter, One Program Leaves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2462535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2462535 - April 2011 (37 comments) Core War: Two Programs Enter, One Program Leaves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153505 - April 2008 (8 comments)

aaron695 5y ago

I remember having to order a copy of the SA article for a small amount of $ (which I didn't have, but didn't not have, kids didn't have money) and a week wait at school from the state library. Different world... (And the hysteria in the 80s/early 90s was this was training for computer virus writers ;) but people also thought computer crime was fun so it wasn't like D&D style hysteria)

rahen 5y ago

Unfortunately corewar.io seems down. I'm not sure what happened to them.

misslibby 5y ago
works for me
- rahen 5y ago
  Does it really? https://www.corewar.io/app/editor/src https://www.corewar.io/app/editor/src
  - banana_giraffe 5y ago
    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.
    - minitoar 5y ago
      I found that clicking the "play" link at the top made a difference? Pretty weird.
      - gowld 5y ago
        --------------- Page Not Found Looks like you've followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn't exist on this site. Back to our site If this is your site, and you weren't expecting a 404 for this path, please visit Netlify's "page not found" support guide for troubleshooting tips.
    - ctoth 5y ago
      Sounds like someone's doing something with the Referer header.
  - Msw242 5y ago
    Yeah sometimes I get through. Try refreshing

harles 5y ago

I have fond memories of this being the final challenge of Zebulun[0]. They took a top performing program and gave specific requirements, like creating a vampire pit to trap the other program. [0]: https://www.ca-zeb.com/zebulun/ https://www.ca-zeb.com/zebulun/

nmstoker 5y ago

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 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.

pacaro 5y ago
I have a copy of that issue of Micro User gathering dust somewhere! But I remembered that they called it "redcode"

bear8642 5y ago

Wasn't there variant of this Doug McIlroy won by getting core below attack limit?

impomatic 5y ago
Yes, that's Darwin from 1961 https://corewar.co.uk/darwin.htm https://corewar.co.uk/darwin.htm

anyfoo 5y ago

Are there any write ups into the details of how, say, the contest winners work? I remember having a few good afternoons of fun with Core War as a teenager back in the day (I probably found an implementation on a shareware/freeware CD). But while that made me understand the tradeoffs of some of the common strategies mentioned on this wiki page pretty well, getting into the (often entirely uncommented) complex red code of some of the winners wasn't something I was too keen on doing without at least some description.

swayvil 5y ago

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

anyfoo 5y ago
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".
- charcircuit 5y ago
- swayvil 5y ago

optimalsolver 5y ago

There's an x86 version: https://shooshx.github.io/corewars8086_js/war/page.html https://shooshx.github.io/corewars8086_js/war/page.html

thom 5y ago

Has anyone created some sort of Core War Zero?

optimalsolver 5y ago
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125.2545&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125... http://borax.polux-hosting.com/madchat/coding/corewars/corewargenetic.pdf http://borax.polux-hosting.com/madchat/coding/corewars/corew... https://ailab.ijs.si/nenad_tomasev/files/2012/07/Tomashev_diplomski.pdf https://ailab.ijs.si/nenad_tomasev/files/2012/07/Tomashev_di...

anugrahit 5y ago

dewdney is a genious, loved reading "The Armchair Universe", " The New Turing Omnibus" while i was in high school, i still go back to re-read, to see his unique fun way of exposition on CS theory

saagarjha 5y ago

Sounds like it would fit right in at a King of the Hill CTF challenge.

andai 5y ago

See also: Darwin (1961). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(programming_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(programming_game)

sterlind 5y ago

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.

remram 5y ago
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.
gowld 5y ago
> rock-paper-scissors equilibria is only a crude approximation.
js8 5y ago
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.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Screeps comes to mind: https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/

anta40 5y ago

Is there implementation that is actively maintained? CoreWar looks like my ideal programming game. Now I'm playing Zachtronic games (TIS100, Shenzen I/O) and occasionally Robocode.

shagie 5y ago
https://github.com/akosela/pmars https://github.com/akosela/pmars appears to be one of the more recently built ones. It's a pretty much "finished" application.

dennajort 5y ago

I remember having done a project like that in my CS school. We had to do a compiler from some pseudo asm to the binary opcode supported by the corewar VM, the corewar VM itself (you can call it the arena) and a champion and we would fight champions across teams. Taugh me a lot about opcodes and emulation.

lelouch11 5y ago
Is there a resource available online? Would love to try implementing this.
- dennajort 5y ago
  This is the most complete description I found (I don't have my original one sorry), in french also http://oxyde.free.fr/projets/vm.html http://oxyde.free.fr/projets/vm.html I can provide a list of champions source code (asm) that was provided to test all of that. Also found this project that looks quite complete https://github.com/ClementBolin/Corewar_Epitech https://github.com/ClementBolin/Corewar_Epitech

shagie 5y ago

Koth is still running for those who want to try - http://www.koth.org/lcgi-bin/current.pl?hill94 http://www.koth.org/lcgi-bin/current.pl?hill94 shows "Last battle concluded at : Sun Feb 6 01:34:58 UTC 2022" ... Though that also suggests that it isn't run that often either.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
It takes a lot of time to write a competitive warrior. I'm thrilled that people are still playing at all.
Doxin 5y ago
AFAIK it runs when you submit a warrior, Of course these days that's not super frequent, but it's not like you need to wait days after submitting a warrior either.

zorkian 5y ago

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/ http://necrobones.com/atrobots/ And my best robot: http://necrobones.com/pub/atrobots/robots/unlocked/mj6.at2 http://necrobones.com/pub/atrobots/robots/unlocked/mj6.at2 Anyway, I loved this kind of thing as a teenager. I felt it really helped me to fall in love with programming and the ability to make things happen by writing code.

RHSeeger 5y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_(video_game)

ionchannel 5y ago

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?

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
It is highly optimized, so it is rare for a completely new strategy to emerge. But it also depends on the mix of other warriors, and you can create different types of environments and challenges.
Doxin 5y ago
It's definitely not solved yet. The various king of the hill servers are still ever changing. I figure it's a rock-paper-scissors type thing: there's no one ultimate best solution. That said, the warriors have gotten crazy good so getting a spot in the top 10 is very hard.

mmahemoff 5y ago

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?

NieDzejkob 5y ago
Every now and then there is one at codegolf.SE's king-of-the-hill tag

cwyptocuwency 5y ago

My FIL told me about this at thanksgiving! Said he had a lot of fun with them back in college

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

I love (and loved) Core War. I was maybe 12 or 13 in the late 80s, born and living in a tiny town in central Italy (Assisi), in love with technology and programming, also thanks to an older brother and his Commodore64. One of his friend, ~10 years older than me, was studying CS in Pisa (one of the best CS universities in Europe, at least back then), but was frequently back home, and I used to visit him and play some videogames with him on his 386 or 486. At some point he introduced me to Core War. I was instantly hooked, and we started writing "viruses" (that's how we called the programs) and then run tournament to see which one would perform best. I loved programming these things, and the intellectual challenge associated with it. I am forever thankful to the creators of Core War. I ended up studying CS, moving abroad to work at AWS as a Technology Evangelist (first employee in Europe, back in 2008), and eventually having a rather successful career in IT. Core War deserves part of the gratefulness for all I had in life. BTW, this is the story of how I found my job at Amazon [0]. [0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-314ee8634da9 https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...

impomatic 5y ago

There's a Core War tournament in progress this week, being livestreamed on twitch https://twitch.tv/corewarglobal https://twitch.tv/corewarglobal Also, there are better quality scans of Dewdney's articles here https://corewar.co.uk/sciam/ https://corewar.co.uk/sciam/