Saturday 12 July 2008

Miz's Corewar Page

A few days ago Mizcu moved his webpage to http://users.evtek.fi/~mikaos/corewar/, so now seems like an ideal opportunity to take a closer look.

The highlight of Mizcu's site is Monowire's story, the tale of a beginner's warrior.  Mizcu details the development of his oneshot from a beginner warrior to king of the KOTH.org '94nop hill.

Also in the Redcode section, Mizcu publishes some of his Corewar projects, including a generic table scan, Stoney the second and Lady Imperactive. Huffpaper includes an interesting variation to the standard silk concept.

Finally, there's an article about decoys which Mizcu is working on.  This covers the basics, active decoys, invisibility and will eventually include decoy makers.

What I liked:
  • Monowire's story
Room for improvement:
  • A few comments would make the code easier to understand

Wednesday 2 July 2008

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: