Will Varfar's Corewar Page

Will Varfar has a webpage devoted to Corewar at http://redcoder.sourceforge.net and shares some of his experiences implementing and testing Redcode simulators and evolvers.

Will's Which MARS report gives a thorough examination of different simulators, including some observations on their inner workings. The report concentrates on 6 open source MARS. It would be interesting to see the closed source simulators included in the comparison.

Species is Will's Redcode evolver, which attempts to improve on past evolvers with the introduction of species and chromosomes. Source code and a Windows .exe are available to download.

Some interesting statistics are published on Will's page. Will has gathered data about the frequency of opcode execution during a round robin of over 400k battles. Taking this one step further, graphs have been generated showing how the opcode frequency changes during a battle.

This data has been used to automatically divide the warriors into groups based on their execution fingerprint. It might be interesting to compare the results to those of Joonas's self organising maps.

Finally, there are a couple of article in which Will discusses the development of his entries for Neo's Mini Challenge #3 and Redcoder's Frenzy round 9.

What I liked:

• In my opinion, Will has the most visually attractive Corewar site
• 100% original content

Room for improvement:

• the 3d graph of Optimax benchmark stats is a bit tricky to interpret