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