Maezumo: The Corewar Evolver with a Twist

2009 looks set to be the year of the evolver with 5 new evolvers to date. The latest offering is Christian 'Fizmo' Schmidt's Maezumo, the Corewar Evolver with a Twist.

After extracting the archive and changing the settings in maezumo.ini for nano I fired up Maezumo. The evolver produces a table of results in index.htm which refreshes every few minutes.

For the first 93 steps simple coreclears ruled the day. Warrior 93 was a simple paper and over the next 20 or so steps papers managed to take complete control. By step 130 most of the papers had disappeared to reappear again at step 174.

At this point I noticed a potential problem. Whether through my error or a bug in the program, the last line of every warrior is always dat.f $0, $0. So far I haven't figured how to fix this.

My first impressions of Maezumo are that it's effective, maintains diversity in the pool and the reports look fantastic. For a future version it would be nice to see more statistics in the reports, e.g. lineage.

A New Arms Race, the Tiny Evolvers

A new Corewar arms race is in progress, the battle to create the smallest effective Corewar evolver. There are currently two contenders:

• Terry Newton: Terry is the evolver guru having previously written three evolvers, Fizzle, REBS and Redmaker. Terry has three new tiny evolvers, JB, SEWAX and LCE. At least two of these have produced nano warriors that entered the hill.
• John Metcalf: John is a hand-coder who recently got tempted by the dark side of Corewar! John has published two versions of his tiny Corewar evolver, TEV. Both TEV0 and TEV12 have created warriors which entered the nano hill.

Right now, I'm wondering if anyone will break the 1K barrier and if so, who :)

April Update: What's New in Corewar?

Here's a quick summary of what's new during April:

• An Introduction to Corewar - TechTinkering
• Redcode's OISC - the DJN Computer
• A Tribute to Corewar
• Terry Newton's Offline Evolver Hills
  

March Update: What's New in Corewar?

Here's a quick summary of the last couple of months:

Blog posts:

• Core War: the King of Programming Games
• Corewar - the Ultimate Game?
• Core War: A Dying Breed
• Happy 25th Birthday Core War!
• Underload Interpreter in Redcode

Articles and Software:

• Using Core War to Simulate Evolution
• Infinite DynaHills, including Nano
• RedMixer

nano papers: ghoulish and Apis Mellifera

Here are a couple of nano paper/clear I've been playing with recently using a mov.i #1,<1 anti-imp clear.

;redcode-nano
;name ghoulish
;author S.Fernandes
;strategy paper/clear
;assert CORESIZE == 80

pstep   equ     -39
cpos    equ     -18
dpos    equ     27

paper   spl     #-21        ,    <-32
        mov     }paper-1    ,    }pboot
        mov.i   #1          ,    <1
pboot   spl     <pstep      ,    cpos
        djn.f   paper+1     ,    <dpos
        end

;redcode-nano
;name Apis Mellifera
;author S.Fernandes
;strategy paper/clear
;assert CORESIZE == 80

pstep   equ     -22
cpos    equ     -18
dpos    equ     -8

paper   spl     #0          ,    <33
        mov     }paper      ,    }pboot
pboot   spl     <pstep      ,    <-16
        mov.i   #1          ,    <1
        djn     paper+1     ,    #dpos
        end

Redcode Forth

Redcode Forth is an interpreter for a 36 word subset of the Forth programming language. I don't know much about Forth, but fortunately the interpreter is supplied with a summary of the instruction set and a step-by-step example.

The interpreter uses a new Redcode instruction to display text, sts. I wonder if John is also planning to support ARES which has a different system for i/o?

January Update: What's New in Corewar?

Here are the latest Corewar updates for January:

• Thoughts on Corewar...: Brainf*** Interpreter
• :Random: Brainf*** interpreter in Redcode
• Thoughts on Corewar...: Interpreter for RSSB...
• :Random: SUBLEQ interpreter in Redcode
• Thoughts on Corewar...: Call / Return Macros
• Cover Scans of The Core War Newsletter
• The Corewar DynaHill
• '88 Koenigstuhl: Utterer '88
• '88 Koenigstuhl: Moonwipe
• '88 Koenigstuhl: Galling

The DynaHill at Corewar.Info

Towards the end of last week, Christian Schmidt announced a new Corewar hill, hosted at corewar.info. The Corewar DynaHill is build around a different concept to KOTH and SAL.

The battles are scheduled at regular intervals, regardless of the number of submissions. When battle takes place, the warriors fight their neighbours and  move up or down the ranks depending on the number of wins or losses.

The hill is unlimited in size. LP and '94 Standard warriors can be submitted to the same hill. The battle settings are decided from the warriors' ;redcode declarations.

Apparently, the system is similar to the rankings used in Japanese Sumo. To find out more, visit the DynaHill FAQ.

December Corewar Updates

Here are the latest Corewar updates from December:

• The Real Red: RedArena - Core War and Warrior Evolution
  
• Thoughts on Corewar...: Write Number (implemented using a data stack)
  
• corewar.co.uk: Suggestions for New Instructions
• Thoughts on Corewar...: Hello World in Redcode