not exactly the same because it's not playing an established human vs. human game such as Battleship, but Core War [0] from 1984 is the earliest example of this

not exactly the same because it's not playing an established human vs. human game such as Battleship, but Core War [0] from 1984 is the earliest example of this idea that I'm aware of. > At the beginning of a game, each battle program is loaded into memory at a random location, after which each program executes one instruction in turn. The goal of the game is to cause the processes of opposing programs to terminate (which happens if they execute an invalid instruction), leaving the victorious program in sole possession of the machine. Battlecode [1] from MIT seems to be along similar lines as well 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War 1: https://battlecode.org/ https://battlecode.org/