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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

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/
- sterlind 5y ago
  first to compute a neutral program is a really neat idea. the more RTS-style ideas feel unnatural to bolt onto it, but the requirement to do something useful would be neat. I can imagine strategies of stealing competing warriors' work or corrupting data. I wonder if you could do like, ASLR core wars somehow. also befunge wars would be fun but break me.
rklaehn 5y ago
I remember as a kid, being annoyed that you get penalised for replicating. This is different to nature, where replicating gives you more "processing power". So I wrote a version where every thread was running at the same speed, but that was always dominated by very simple replicators. Then I tried to figure out how to have an instruction set where all instructions run at the same time. But I could not come up with something that worked well. Recently I wrote a "cellular automaton with provenance" thing. Basically game of life, but you track the originator of each cell. That is fun, but also does not lead to a good game as far as I can see.
- eru 5y ago
  > I remember as a kid, being annoyed that you get penalised for replicating. This is different to nature, where replicating gives you more "processing power". Perhaps you can make your idea work with some more real world ideas? In the real world, you need resources to do anything. You find resources in the environment. Be that water, food or sunlight etc. In Core Wars processing power is a resource. In standard Core Wars, your side has a fixed supply of resources. Replicating just divides that fixed supply amongst more agents. Somewhat realistic. You can steal other people's processing power, if you manage to make some of their threads execute your code. (In that weirder sense, replicating in Core Wars can give you more processing power.) Your idea was to hand out the resource of processing power just in relation to how many times you replicated. You found that's not workable. Perhaps you could come up with a way to make players earn processing power?

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/
sterlind 5y ago
first to compute a neutral program is a really neat idea. the more RTS-style ideas feel unnatural to bolt onto it, but the requirement to do something useful would be neat. I can imagine strategies of stealing competing warriors' work or corrupting data. I wonder if you could do like, ASLR core wars somehow. also befunge wars would be fun but break me.

rklaehn 5y ago

I remember as a kid, being annoyed that you get penalised for replicating. This is different to nature, where replicating gives you more "processing power". So I wrote a version where every thread was running at the same speed, but that was always dominated by very simple replicators. Then I tried to figure out how to have an instruction set where all instructions run at the same time. But I could not come up with something that worked well. Recently I wrote a "cellular automaton with provenance" thing. Basically game of life, but you track the originator of each cell. That is fun, but also does not lead to a good game as far as I can see.

eru 5y ago
> I remember as a kid, being annoyed that you get penalised for replicating. This is different to nature, where replicating gives you more "processing power". Perhaps you can make your idea work with some more real world ideas? In the real world, you need resources to do anything. You find resources in the environment. Be that water, food or sunlight etc. In Core Wars processing power is a resource. In standard Core Wars, your side has a fixed supply of resources. Replicating just divides that fixed supply amongst more agents. Somewhat realistic. You can steal other people's processing power, if you manage to make some of their threads execute your code. (In that weirder sense, replicating in Core Wars can give you more processing power.) Your idea was to hand out the resource of processing power just in relation to how many times you replicated. You found that's not workable. Perhaps you could come up with a way to make players earn processing power?