From: John.Metcalf@p18.f94.chaos.camelot.co.uk (John Metcalf) Subject: Darwin Date: 1998/07/01 Message-ID: #1/1 Greetings all... This is a repeat request for information about Darwin, which is an early programming game, similar to Core War, but about 10 years earlier. Last time I requested this, I received a *very* interesting reply from Paul Kline, which just increased my desire for knowledge. I need all details possible so I can write a simulator. Possibly, the name Victor Vssotsky has something to do with Darwin. Thanks for any help you can offer. Cheers, John From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: <359C1EA8.79A0@alaska.net>#1/1 Yousef Siddiq wrote: > > David Matthew Moore wrote: > > > sieben@imap1.asu.edu wrote: > > : : Well, I see how it would be more fun then algebra (I really LOATH all > > : : those formulas), but I also agree that you should give Core War a try. > > > > : Hey guys, what's wrong with algebra? Algebra is fun. How the heck do you > > : optimize constants without algebra. I like calculus too. > > > > : Nandor. > > > > Man, I miss my algebra classes. Group theory, computational complexity, > > graph theory, combinatorics, and logic. All of my electives were math. > > Those days were the best... > > I take math becuase I need it to graduate. Still have along way to go > though. Still have to take trig and pre-calc and the calc-a and calc-b and > calc-c and linear equations and one other class that I can't seem to > rememeber. I can see it now...my brain is going to explode I know it. Oh yeah...I really get teary eyed thinking of math...*sniff*. Ugh-memorizing formulas, having teachers yell at you, and not understanding a bit. Of course, it probably has to do with me not ever paying attention.... Though, I must admit, math in any form is rather useful. I just don't like it too much...and though optimizing constants is also important, it isn't my favorite activity... -WFB From: "John K. Lewis" Subject: Corewarrior! Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: <_bUm1.2202$24.12432656@news.itd.umich.edu>#1/1 When is the new issue of CoreWarrior coming out? Who's has to do it this time, and do you want an article written about anything? John - < john k. lewis > < jklewis@umich.edu > < apple > < sig.virus 2.3 > From: Yousef Siddiq Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: <359BAF25.B3FA49A9@sm.saddleback.cc.ca.us>#1/1 David Matthew Moore wrote: > sieben@imap1.asu.edu wrote: > : : Well, I see how it would be more fun then algebra (I really LOATH all > : : those formulas), but I also agree that you should give Core War a try. > > : Hey guys, what's wrong with algebra? Algebra is fun. How the heck do you > : optimize constants without algebra. I like calculus too. > > : Nandor. > > Man, I miss my algebra classes. Group theory, computational complexity, > graph theory, combinatorics, and logic. All of my electives were math. > Those days were the best... I take math becuase I need it to graduate. Still have along way to go though. Still have to take trig and pre-calc and the calc-a and calc-b and calc-c and linear equations and one other class that I can't seem to rememeber. I can see it now...my brain is going to explode I know it. From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: <6nga8k$q1n$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 sieben@imap1.asu.edu wrote: : : Well, I see how it would be more fun then algebra (I really LOATH all : : those formulas), but I also agree that you should give Core War a try. : Hey guys, what's wrong with algebra? Algebra is fun. How the heck do you : optimize constants without algebra. I like calculus too. : Nandor. Man, I miss my algebra classes. Group theory, computational complexity, graph theory, combinatorics, and logic. All of my electives were math. Those days were the best... From: sieben@imap1.asu.edu Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: <6ng857$kqj$1@news.asu.edu>#1/1 : Well, I see how it would be more fun then algebra (I really LOATH all : those formulas), but I also agree that you should give Core War a try. Hey guys, what's wrong with algebra? Algebra is fun. How the heck do you optimize constants without algebra. I like calculus too. Nandor. From: Sebastien SAUVAGE Subject: Empty group ? Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: #1/1 Empty group ? shame shame... Want CoreWare information and programs ? Have a look at http://www.koth.org and enjoy tricky programming ! From: Lars Subject: Re: anybody alive? Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: <359B6AE9.41C6@htw-dresden.de>#1/1 > > does anybody read this newsgroup? ja > did corewars dead? no, but it needs many time to write a fighter. L. From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: Darwin Date: 1998/07/02 Message-ID: <359B1581.2CCC@alaska.net>#1/1 John Metcalf wrote: > > Greetings all... > > This is a repeat request for information about Darwin, which is > an early programming game, similar to Core War, but about 10 > years earlier. > > Last time I requested this, I received a *very* interesting reply > from Paul Kline, which just increased my desire for knowledge. I > need all details possible so I can write a simulator. > > Possibly, the name Victor Vssotsky has something to do with Darwin. > Yep. It was created in 1962 by Morris McIlroy and Victor Vyssotsky, if I remembered correctly. I don't know if you should try to ressuruct it though-when Bob Morris played around with Darwin for a week, he ended up creating a 30-line program which analyzed the enemies defenses and attacked accordingly. My guess was that it operated a little like a p-spacer. Anyhow, it was unbeatable, and the game ended. That's about all I know. Maybe you could try contacting someone who worked at Bell Labs, as that was where it was created. -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/03 Message-ID: <359D61B1.43D2@alaska.net>#1/1 Bjoern Guenzel wrote: > > On Thu, 02 Jul 1998 23:51:10 GMT, cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > > > Oh yeah...I really get teary eyed thinking of math...*sniff*. > >Ugh-memorizing formulas, having teachers yell at you, and not > >understanding a bit. Of course, it probably has to do with me not ever > >paying attention.... > > Sounds more as if you were taking classes in applied maths, which > really isn't so much fun... Try pure maths :-) > True, true. For quite awhile, actually, I really enjoyed the intellectual challenge of just math. It was rather thrilling to come across a fun, challenging problem, that I solved through some way or another. Then, they made me do actual WORK! Imagine that! Left me bitter towards math...oh well...maybe I will enjoy math again someday...perhaps not...*sighs*... -WFB From: Anton Marsden Subject: Re: Corewarrior! Date: 1998/07/03 Message-ID: #1/1 On Thu, 2 Jul 1998, John K. Lewis wrote: > When is the new issue of CoreWarrior coming out? Who's has to do > it this time, and do you want an article written about anything? Don't know. Don't know. Yes - if you want to write an article, go for it. Just mail it to all editors and it will probably end up in the next issue (assuming the article is not full of errors). Anton. From: Sebastien SAUVAGE Subject: Sorry. Date: 1998/07/03 Message-ID: #1/1 Sorry for my previous message. I may have problem with my newsgroup browser (PINE). (I only see my messages... arg). From: guenzel.p1@usa.net (Bjoern Guenzel) Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/03 Message-ID: <359c9573.206416@news.lrz-muenchen.de>#1/1 On Thu, 02 Jul 1998 23:51:10 GMT, cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > Oh yeah...I really get teary eyed thinking of math...*sniff*. >Ugh-memorizing formulas, having teachers yell at you, and not >understanding a bit. Of course, it probably has to do with me not ever >paying attention.... Sounds more as if you were taking classes in applied maths, which really isn't so much fun... Try pure maths :-) > Though, I must admit, math in any form is rather useful. I just >don't >like it too much...and though optimizing constants is also important, it >isn't my favorite activity... > -WFB > Bjoern From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: CoreWarrior Date: 1998/07/03 Message-ID: <359C534D.51C3@alaska.net>#1/1 How about for the next issue of CW somebody writes an article on the beginnings of Core War AND its predescessors (Darwin...). Maybe not so useful, but possibly interesting, and it would be helpful if someone drudged up some ancient info the beginnings of Core War like games. Also, include info on games like CROBOTS, PC-ROBOTS, and (slimy advertisement coming up...) that new, interesting, fantastic game in developments, called Drones. -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Darwin Date: 1998/07/03 Message-ID: <359C1ED8.84D@alaska.net>#1/1 Does anyone know of anywhere to find info on Darwin? -WFB From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Corewarrior! Date: 1998/07/04 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <_bUm1.2202$24.12432656@news.itd.umich.edu>, John K. Lewis wrote >When is the new issue of CoreWarrior coming out? Who's has to do >it this time, and do you want an article written about anything? In order: 1) When one of the authors has some free time :-) 2) Whichever one of the authors has some free time :-) 3) Yes, please (not that I have any good article ideas!) Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ | http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm | | Join the Redcode Maniacs Tournament: | \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/maniacs.htm / (Ooops... who's got an out-of-date sig??) From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: pizza Date: 1998/07/05 Message-ID: <19980705143857.5911.rocketmail@send1d.yahoomail.com>#1/1 is it normal to have _9_ warriors waiting to enter the tournament at pizza? BTW, maybe we're going to have another hill, maintainer: me. If it works, it'll be at crosswinds(www.crosswind.net) in about 2 months; but, i need help for the scripts as i know nothing to scripts. Well, maybe i could use C, but i know alomost nothing...(HELP!!) == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: new hill Date: 1998/07/05 Message-ID: <199807051337.IAA14276@endeavor.flash.net>#1/1 >The '94 hill is dominated by P-spacers and Q^2s, so for greatest variety >inhibit them both on the new one. 50 is long enough for most other >warrior types. At the moment the 94nop hill is clearly dominated by Blur-style scanning. :) From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: new hill Date: 1998/07/05 Message-ID: <199807051335.IAA14101@endeavor.flash.net>#1/1 >I've always thought it rather artificial to have 100 instruction limites. >Perhaps a better system would be to factor in Coresize. For example >1% of core size is max size. (In this case 80 instructions) This >seems to create a good rule of thumb while keeping the quick-scanners >from be too viable. On the no pspace hill I don't think you see a lot of warriors using all 100 instructions, as was the case back in '88. Having an instruction limit larger than that commonly used is actually detrimental to qscans. Imagine if the limit was upped to 500 instead of 100. Certainly your warrior would be booted away before it got bombed, given that you've got about 470 lines to put decoys in. -jkw From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/05 Message-ID: <19980705112717.13262.rocketmail@send1c.yahoomail.com>#1/1 ---Yousef Siddiq wrote: > > > > Anton Marsden wrote: > > > This newsgroup is for Core War and related games. PC Robots, C++ > > Robots, etc., are considered to be related games. In my opinion, we > > don't see enough PC/C++ Robots discussion in r.g.c. > > > > Anton. > > > > On Fri, 26 Jun 1998, John K. Lewis wrote: > > > > > Depends on what you wanted to post about. This newsgroups is about > > > the incredible game called core wars. If you like PC Robots you might > > > like Core Wars. > > > > > > See the FAQ: > > > > > > http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~amarsden/corewars/corewar-faq.html > > > > > > Yousef Siddiq wrote: > > > : I hope I am not posting to the wrong place. I saw on a pcrobots webpage > > > : a reference to this newsgroup. I was wondering whether this is the right > > > : place or not. Thanks. > > I heard about corwars about a year ago, but since I don't know assembly it > seemed rather complicated. When I learn assembly then I will probably give > corewar a go but until then I will stick with something I can understand a lot > easier...namely p-robots and pc-robots. Thanks though. > > well, maybe you shouldn't: i actually know almost nothing assembly, mostly cause i'm sticking to QBasic 4.5. Still, understand corewar (took me months though)... == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: "Bryn ''Curious'' Davies" Subject: Re: I could use help understanding corewar. Date: 1998/07/05 Message-ID: <359F685A.45AA8EA1@socs.uts.edu.au>#1/1 These helped me... I printed them out and put them in a folder: Steven Morrells "My First Corewar Book" parts 1 & 2 Corewars For Dummies The rec.games.corewar FAQ Beginner's Guide To Redcode by Ilmari Karonen Intro To Art in '88: Miscellaneous Tips And Tricks Intro to Redcode pts. 1 & 2 (from Rice University) Steves Guide For Beginners 1 to 12 Yes, its a bloody huge folder. These vary in complexity, but for the first couple of months / years :) its going to seem like black magic. Especially "Winter Werewolf" ;) You should be able to get all these files from www.koth.org, so good hunting :) P.S. - For the rest of you: I'm working on something - expect me to be bugging you all again soon :) P.P.S. - Oh - and just ask questions on this list - these people are REALLY friendly :) -- +---------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | Bryn "Curious" Davies: | "Maybe this was just a warming | | badavies@socs.uts.edu.au | up... a token so humans would | | www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~curious | not lose heart..." | | S.P.U.T.U.M. Unit DCCXLVII(748) | - "Contact", Carl Sagan | +---------------------------------+----------------------------------+ From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: new hill Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <6gAxCDBhaRo1Ew5g@kendalls.demon.co.uk>#1/1 In article , John K. Lewis wrote >jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu wrote: >: Having an instruction limit larger than that commonly used is >: actually detrimental to qscans. > >: Imagine if the limit was upped to 500 instead of 100. Certainly your >: warrior would be booted away before it got bombed, given that you've >: got about 470 lines to put decoys in. > >I think I have to disagree with your assessment. The benefit to quickscans >in my opinion is that it normally trades wins with other quickscanners >while still gaining wins against other warriors. This really wouldn't >change with increased size. So why aren't there any qscanners on the 200-length LP hill? :-) Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Processes question. Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <6nqieg$psf$1@hermes.is.co.za>, Frederik Strauss wrote >Hi.. > >Just a quick question. >If I have a warrior with 2 processes A and C and the opponent has one >process b. Do they get executed AbCAbC.. or AbCbAbCb..? AbCbAbCb; otherwise the warrior with two processes would be running at twice the speed of the one processes one, and splitting would be _much_ too big an advantage. Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: new hill Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <199807060656.BAA15602@endeavor.flash.net>#1/1 >What, in your opinion, is the ideal "size" for qscanners? For the 8000 instruction hill, I think in the range of 60-80 is the ideal size. >I think I have to disagree with your assessment. The benefit to quickscans >in my opinion is that it normally trades wins with other quickscanners >while still gaining wins against other warriors. This really wouldn't >change with increased size. Well. Let's say we changed max size to 4000, or CORESIZE/2. If one opponent used code such as this: i for 2000 dat i,i rof ;insert warrior here :-) i for 1990 dat i,i rof There would be absolutely no point in qscanning, except to scan the locations of the core that YOU originally occupied, since they're the only ones that don't start off full of decoys. :) From: "John K. Lewis" Subject: Re: Processes question. Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <6f8o1.2590$24.15168198@news.itd.umich.edu>#1/1 Frederik Strauss wrote: : Hi.. : Just a quick question. : If I have a warrior with 2 processes A and C and the opponent has one : process b. Do they get executed AbCAbC.. or AbCbAbCb..? The latter. You alternate process cycles with your opponent, and if you split your cycles up they aill alternate on your turn. (in other words, the more processes you have, the slower each one will run.) John Lewis From: "Frederik Strauss" Subject: Processes question. Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <6nqieg$psf$1@hermes.is.co.za>#1/1 Hi.. Just a quick question. If I have a warrior with 2 processes A and C and the opponent has one process b. Do they get executed AbCAbC.. or AbCbAbCb..? Assuming of course that A started first and split into C aswell. Cheers Fred fstrauss@icon.co.za From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - 94 No Pspace 07/06/98 Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <199807060400.AAA12150@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/06/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG 94 No Pspace CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 5 02:17:41 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 42/ 37/ 21 The Machine Anton Marsden 146 29 2 44/ 43/ 13 Lonely Ghost David Moore 145 38 3 24/ 10/ 67 The Fugitive David Moore 137 42 4 31/ 25/ 44 Fixed Ken Espiritu 136 23 5 31/ 27/ 42 Newt Ian Oversby 136 41 6 29/ 23/ 48 Gemini Dream John K Wilkinson 135 46 7 31/ 26/ 44 Vain Ian Oversby 135 40 8 31/ 26/ 43 Baseline Plus Ken Espiritu 135 21 9 39/ 44/ 16 Eggbeater Anton Marsden 135 30 10 29/ 24/ 47 Freight Train v0.2 David Moore 135 4 11 38/ 43/ 20 Scanther Christian Schmidt 132 7 12 30/ 28/ 42 Head or Tail Christian Schmidt 132 11 13 28/ 26/ 46 Pulp v0.4 Ian Oversby 130 39 14 29/ 31/ 40 Alien Christian Schmidt 128 17 15 30/ 32/ 38 Torch t18 P.Kline 127 43 16 22/ 18/ 60 Return Of Return Of The J John K W 126 44 17 35/ 45/ 20 C^3 Christian Schmidt 125 10 18 30/ 36/ 34 PAN-TAU-RA Christian Schmidt 124 13 19 35/ 45/ 20 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 124 34 20 13/ 18/ 69 simple paper Ryan Coleman 108 1 21 10/ 22/ 68 Paper Cranes Mike M. 97 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - ICWS Experimental 94 07/06/98 Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <199807060400.AAA12146@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/06/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG ICWS Experimental 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Fri Jun 19 19:00:47 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 41/ 12/ 47 Venom v0.2b Christian Schmidt 171 16 2 32/ 5/ 63 Evol Cap 4 X John Wilkinson 160 63 3 29/ 3/ 69 Evolve X v4.0 John Wilkinson 155 11 4 34/ 14/ 52 Rosebud Beppe 155 42 5 40/ 36/ 25 Dr. Gate X Franz 144 34 6 36/ 34/ 30 BigBoy Robert Macrae 139 88 7 38/ 37/ 25 13 Christian Schmidt 138 1 8 28/ 19/ 53 Purple v0.1 Christian Schmidt 138 15 9 26/ 14/ 60 Sphere v0.2 Christian Schmidt 138 5 10 41/ 47/ 12 S.E.T.I. 4-X JKW 136 64 11 37/ 40/ 23 Stepping Stone 94x Kurt Franke 133 49 12 38/ 43/ 20 Tsunami v0.1 Ian Oversby 132 41 13 33/ 33/ 34 Lithium X 8 John K Wilkinson 132 54 14 38/ 43/ 19 Pagan John K W 132 48 15 39/ 46/ 15 BiShot Christian Schmidt 131 2 16 34/ 38/ 28 Dr. Recover Franz 131 33 17 31/ 31/ 38 Falcon v0.3 X Ian Oversby 130 36 18 37/ 44/ 19 Memories Beppe Bezzi 129 70 19 39/ 53/ 8 HSA Copy 55440 Robert Macrae 124 31 20 33/ 43/ 24 Bob the ImpStoneer Sean McDonald 124 9 21 12/ 72/ 16 ScannerBane WFB 51 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - MultiWarrior 94 07/06/98 Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <199807060400.AAA12142@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/06/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Multiwarrior 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 5 21:41:55 EDT 1998 # Name Author Score Age 1 CyberBunny Compudemon 5034 12 2 Failure John Metcalf 5034 7 3 Ultra Ken Espiritu 5034 14 4 U-lat v3.8 Zul Nadzri 5022 25 5 Aulder Man Ian Oversby 5022 47 6 Time to send in the imps Robert Hale 5022 18 7 aTest 4 P. Kline 5022 3 8 I made pieces of you 'b' Ryan Coleman 5022 1 9 aTest 4 P. Kline 5010 2 10 mTest P. Kline 4998 8 11 aTest P. Kline 4950 4 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - Standard 07/06/98 Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <199807060400.AAA12138@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/06/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Standard KotH CoreWar Hill : Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 5 14:13:25 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 43/ 19/ 38 Freight Train David Moore 167 13 2 39/ 20/ 41 Guardian Ian Oversby 157 12 3 45/ 40/ 15 Foggy Swamp Beppe Bezzi 149 9 4 44/ 41/ 15 Blur '88 Anton Marsden 146 50 5 40/ 34/ 26 Leapfrog David Moore 146 41 6 42/ 39/ 18 Stasis David Moore 146 120 7 31/ 17/ 52 EV Paper John K Wilkinson 146 26 8 41/ 36/ 23 Kitchen Sink Robert Macrae 145 11 9 27/ 9/ 64 Trident^2 '88 John K W 145 36 10 41/ 37/ 23 PacMan David Moore 144 42 11 33/ 21/ 46 Evoltmp 88 John K W 144 63 12 31/ 19/ 49 Test I Ian Oversby 144 69 13 43/ 43/ 14 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 143 338 14 40/ 37/ 23 Tangle Trap David Moore 143 86 15 42/ 40/ 18 Beholder's Eye V1.7 W. Mintardjo 143 288 16 43/ 44/ 13 Blurstone '88 M. J. Pihlaja 142 7 17 32/ 24/ 44 Simple '88 Ian Oversby 140 99 18 32/ 25/ 43 CAPS KEY IS STUCK AGAIN Steven Morrell 138 210 19 38/ 43/ 19 Gisela 8623 Andrzej Maciejczak 134 6 20 18/ 81/ 1 : bomb1 : Joel Bushart 54 1 21 11/ 86/ 3 : troll bridge : Joel Bushart 35 2 From: "John K. Lewis" Subject: Re: new hill Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: #1/1 jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu wrote: : On the no pspace hill I don't think you see a lot of warriors using all : 100 instructions, as was the case back in '88. Having an instruction : limit larger than that commonly used is actually detrimental to qscans. : Imagine if the limit was upped to 500 instead of 100. Certainly your : warrior would be booted away before it got bombed, given that you've : got about 470 lines to put decoys in. : -jkw What, in your opinion, is the ideal "size" for qscanners? I think I have to disagree with your assessment. The benefit to quickscans in my opinion is that it normally trades wins with other quickscanners while still gaining wins against other warriors. This really wouldn't change with increased size. From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: pizza Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <35A01D49.1AEE@alaska.net>#1/1 Paul-V Khuong wrote: > > is it normal to have _9_ warriors waiting to enter the tournament at > pizza? > Uh oh...PLEASE not again... > BTW, maybe we're going to have another hill, maintainer: me. If it > works, it'll be at crosswinds(www.crosswind.net) in about 2 months; > but, i need help for the scripts as i know nothing to scripts. > Well, maybe i could use C, but i know alomost nothing...(HELP!!) > Sounds good. Wow. Someone who knows almost as little as myself....I am impressed. =). -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: I could use help understanding corewar. Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <35A01DA6.3230@alaska.net>#1/1 Planar wrote: > > >From: cgbean@alaska.net > > A good introduction would be Ilmari Something's (sorry, no disrespect > > Ilmari Karonen > Oh, thanks. > >be found on Planar's website, at http://para.inria.fr/~dolgiez/corewar > > > > >First Core War Book by Steven (Morrel?), which is at the KOTH site, and > > Steven Morrell > Oh...well, sorry. You know...only been around for a month or so...please excuse me. -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: Pcrobots Date: 1998/07/06 Message-ID: <35A01CC0.32BD@alaska.net>#1/1 Paul-V Khuong wrote: > > ---Yousef Siddiq wrote: > > > > > > > > Anton Marsden wrote: > > > > > This newsgroup is for Core War and related games. PC Robots, C++ > > > Robots, etc., are considered to be related games. In my opinion, we > > > don't see enough PC/C++ Robots discussion in r.g.c. > > > > > > Anton. > > > > > > On Fri, 26 Jun 1998, John K. Lewis wrote: > > > > > > > Depends on what you wanted to post about. This newsgroups is > about > > > > the incredible game called core wars. If you like PC Robots you > might > > > > like Core Wars. > > > > > > > > See the FAQ: > > > > > > > > http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~amarsden/corewars/corewar-faq.html > > > > > > > > Yousef Siddiq wrote: > > > > : I hope I am not posting to the wrong place. I saw on a > pcrobots webpage > > > > : a reference to this newsgroup. I was wondering whether this is > the right > > > > : place or not. Thanks. > > > > I heard about corwars about a year ago, but since I don't know > assembly it > > seemed rather complicated. When I learn assembly then I will > probably give > > corewar a go but until then I will stick with something I can > understand a lot > > easier...namely p-robots and pc-robots. Thanks though. > > > > > well, maybe you shouldn't: i actually know almost nothing assembly, > mostly cause i'm sticking to QBasic 4.5. Still, understand corewar > (took me months though)... Heh Heh, same here. Lost on Assembly, and sticking to QBASIC...except for the part on understanding it...oh well...be quite about my *ahem* lack of knowledge...=) -WFB From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Re: pizza Date: 1998/07/07 Message-ID: <19980707195853.5077.rocketmail@send1c.yahoomail.com>#1/1 ---cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > > Has anyone had trouble submitting warriors to Pizza? Nope I tried, and it > says that I have an error (in the comment lines). I looked it over, and > there seems to be no problems. Is Pizza down again? Not AGAIN (I was going to submit something that i won't be able to at 94nop:( > -WFB > > == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: "Bryn ''Curious'' Davies" Subject: Re: Free Mech Commander Cheat Code Date: 1998/07/07 Message-ID: <35A20D71.B3C1BA9A@socs.uts.edu.au>#1/1 ASCOTT353 wrote: Hmmm - I sense someone has been bulk spamming "rec.games.*" :) Shall I go after him, fellas? :) P.S. Trying to program emulators helps your corewar ;) B. -- +---------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | Bryn "Curious" Davies: | "Maybe this was just a warming | | badavies@socs.uts.edu.au | up... a token so humans would | | www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~curious | not lose heart..." | | S.P.U.T.U.M. Unit DCCXLVII(748) | - "Contact", Carl Sagan | +---------------------------------+----------------------------------+ From: aon.915610058@aon.at (Beowolf) Subject: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/07 Message-ID: <35a28074.9306005@news.aon.at>#1/1 Hi everybody! (sorry, my english is bad... I'm from Austria) I messed arround with corewars some jears ago and always wanted to make my own compiler/emuulator for it (no interpreter...). Then I forgot about it... Now I'm working on some multiprozessor emulation routines and thought that making a redcode compiler/emulator would be a nice way to get some experience. So here's my question : Is there a need for such a thingy for Win 95/98? MfG Alex From: Christian Schmidt Subject: Re: pizza Date: 1998/07/07 Message-ID: #1/1 Sometime I had have the same problem. Submit your warrior again and it will work. Christian On Tue, 7 Jul 1998 cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > Has anyone had trouble submitting warriors to Pizza? I tried, and it > says that I have an error (in the comment lines). I looked it over, and > there seems to be no problems. Is Pizza down again? > -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: pizza Date: 1998/07/07 Message-ID: <35A193DF.67BE@alaska.net>#1/1 Has anyone had trouble submitting warriors to Pizza? I tried, and it says that I have an error (in the comment lines). I looked it over, and there seems to be no problems. Is Pizza down again? -WFB From: rcoleman@erinet.com Subject: Corewar HoF update?? Date: 1998/07/07 Message-ID: <6nsmlc$59m$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 Is this link as current as it gets for the Corewar HoF?? http://www.public.asu.edu/~sieben/cwhof/cwhof.htm It would be neat to read the rest of the bios, see the pics, etc.. Ryan Coleman -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum From: Anton Marsden Subject: Re: div bomb Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: #1/1 On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, John K. Lewis wrote: > There was talk about it awhile ago. It has one or two problems. > 1) It can turn into a none killing code. DAT can't. > 2) You have to carry the bomb with you, DAT's are free in core. > Aside from these issues, there are no real advantages to useing > them and I think few do. I've tried to incorporate a DIV bomb into several warriors, but without much success. However, bombs like DIV.F #0,<-1 could be useful because they do a different kind of damage to DAT <0,<-1 (or something similar). These DIV bombs might work quite well in a qscan. Anton. From: "Bryn ''Curious'' Davies" Subject: Re: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: <35A35C68.41BC0733@socs.uts.edu.au>#1/1 cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > > Beowolf wrote: > > > > > what I think it would, that wouldn't be a good idea. Then again, we > could send it to that spammer- > Hello there! Free MechWarrior tips for you list! Just double click on > the self-extracting exe! > I think that would take care of him...heh heh. Anyhow, I guess theres Heh heh - lets send him a paper - "Free Memory Goes Buh-Bye" :) I have to agree with WFB on the recompiler issue - If i recall my A-Life history correctly, the whole Idea of redcode was to make sure our warriors didn't get loose! :) Humm. But do we have a pMars that has a working graphical display under 95/98? (besides java) If you were willing to forgo the compiler idea perhaps... But I get the feeling the compilation is the entire idea :) Doh. Ah well, maybe we could COMPILE the warriors and then run them in an EMULATED redcode processor :) Wouldn't that be redundant :) Rgds, B. -- +---------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | Bryn "Curious" Davies: | "Maybe this was just a warming | | badavies@socs.uts.edu.au | up... a token so humans would | | www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~curious | not lose heart..." | | S.P.U.T.U.M. Unit DCCXLVII(748) | - "Contact", Carl Sagan | +---------------------------------+----------------------------------+ From: stst@vuse.vanderbilt.edu (Stefan Strack) Subject: Core War Frequently Asked Questions (rec.games.corewar FAQ) Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: Archive-name: games/corewar-faq Last-Modified: 95/10/12 Version: 3.6 These are the Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) from the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.corewar. A plain text version of this document is posted every two weeks. The hypertext version is available as _________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents 1. What is Core War 2. Is it Core War or Core Wars? 3. Where can I find more information about Core War? 4. Core War has changed since Dewdney's articles. Where do I get a copy of the current instruction set? 5. What is ICWS'94? Which simulators support ICWS'94? 6. What is the ICWS? 7. What is TCWN? 8. How do I join? 9. What is the EBS? 10. Where are the Core War archives? 11. Where can I find a Core War system for ...? 12. I do not have FTP. How do I get all this great stuff? 13. I do not have access to Usenet. How do I post and receive news? 14. Are there any Core War related WWW sites? 15. When is the next tournament? 16. What is KotH? How do I enter? 17. Is it DAT 0, 0 or DAT #0, #0? How do I compare to core? 18. How does SLT (Skip if Less Than) work? 19. What is the difference between in-register and in-memory evaluation? 20. What does (expression or term of your choice) mean? 21. Other questions? _________________________________________________________________ What is Core War? Core War is a game played by two or more programs (and vicariously by their authors) written in an assembly language called Redcode and run in a virtual computer called MARS (for Memory Array Redcode Simulator). The object of the game is to cause all processes of the opposing program to terminate, leaving your program in sole posession of the machine. There are Core War systems available for most computer platforms. Redcode has been standardized by the ICWS, and is therefore transportable between all standard Core War systems. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Is it "Core War" or "Core Wars"? Both terms are used. Early references were to Core War. Later references seem to use Core Wars. I prefer "Core War" to refer to the game in general, "core wars" to refer to more than one specific battle. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Where can I find more information about Core War? Core War was first described in the Core War Guidelines of March, 1984 by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Western Ontario (Canada). Dewdney wrote several "Computer Recreations" articles in Scientific American which discussed Core War, starting with the May 1984 article. Those articles are contained in two anthologies: Author: Dewdney, A. K. Title: The Armchair Universe: An Exploration of Computer Worlds Published: New York: W. H. Freeman (c) 1988 ISBN: 0-7167-1939-8 Library of Congress Call Number: QA76.6 .D517 1988 Author: Dewdney, A. K. Title: The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery Published: New York: W. H. Freeman (c) 1990 ISBN: 0-7167-2125-2 (Hardcover), 0-7167-2144-9 (Paperback) Library of Congress Call Number: QA76.6 .D5173 1990 A.K. Dewdney's articles are still the most readable introduction to Core War, even though the Redcode dialect described in there is no longer current. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Core War has changed since Dewdney's articles. Where do I get a copy of the current instruction set? A draft of the official standard (ICWS'88) is available as . This document is formatted awkwardly and contains ambiguous statements. For a more approachable intro to Redcode, take a look at Mark Durham's tutorial, and . Steven Morrell (morrell@math.utah.edu) is preparing a more practically oriented Redcode tutorial that discusses different warrior classes with lots of example code. Mail him for a preliminary version. Michael Constant (mconst@csua.berkeley.edu) is reportedly working on a beginner's introduction. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is ICWS'94? Which simulators support ICWS'94? There is an ongoing discussion about future enhancements to the Redcode language. A proposed new standard, dubbed ICWS'94, is currently being evaluated. A major change is the addition of "instruction modifiers" that allow instructions to modify A-field, B-field or both. Also new is a post-increment indirect addressing mode and unrestricted opcode and addressing mode combination ("no illegal instructions"). ICWS'94 is backwards compatible; i.e. ICWS'88 warriors will run correctly on an ICWS'94 system. Take a look at the ICWS'94 draft for more information. You can try out the new standard by submitting warriors to the '94 hills of the KotH servers. Two corewar systems currently support ICWS'94, pMARS (many platforms) and Redcoder (Mac), both available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is the ICWS? About one year after Core War first appeared in Sci-Am, the "International Core War Society" (ICWS) was established. Since that time, the ICWS has been responsible for the creation and maintenance of Core War standards and the running of Core War tournaments. There have been six annual tournaments and two standards (ICWS'86 and ICWS'88). [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is TCWN? Since March of 1987, "The Core War Newsletter" (TCWN) has been the official newsletter of the ICWS. It is published quarterly and recent issues are also available as Encapsulated PostScript files. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ How do I join? For more information about joining the ICWS (which includes a subscription to TCWN), or to contribute an article, review, cartoon, letter, joke, rumor, etc. to TCWN, please contact: Jon Newman 13824 NE 87th Street Redmond, WA 98052-1959 email: jonn@microsoft.com (Note: Microsoft has NO affiliation with Core War. Jon Newman just happens to work there, and we want to keep it that way!) Current annual dues are $15.00 in US currency. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is the EBS? The Electronic Branch Section (EBS) of the ICWS is a group of Core War enthusiasts with access to electronic mail. There are no fees associated with being a member of the EBS, and members do reap some of the benefits of full ICWS membership without the expense. For instance, the ten best warriors submitted to the EBS tournament are entered into the annual ICWS tournament. All EBS business is conducted in the rec.games.corewar newsgroup. The current goal of the EBS is to be at the forefront of Core War by writing and implementing new standards and test suites. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Where are the Core War archives? Many documents such as the guidelines and the ICWS standards along with previous tournament Redcode entries and complete Core War systems are available via anonymous ftp from (128.32.149.19) in the /pub/corewar directories. Also, most of past rec.games.corewar postings (including Redcode source listings) are archived there. Jon Blow (blojo@csua.berkeley.edu) is the archive administrator. When uploading to /pub/corewar/incoming, ask Jon to move your upload to the appropriate directory and announce it on the net. Much of what is available on soda is also available on the German archive at iraun1.ira.uka.de (129.13.10.90) in the /pub/x11/corewars directory. The plain text version of this FAQ is automatically archived by news.answers. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Where can I find a Core War system for . . . ? Core War systems are available via anonymous ftp from ftp.csua.berkeley.edu in the /pub/corewar/systems directory. Currently, there are UNIX, IBM PC-compatible, Macintosh, and Amiga Core War systems available there. It is a good idea to check for program updates first. CAUTION! There are many, many Core War systems available which are NOT ICWS'88 (or even ICWS'86) compatible available at various archive sites other than ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. Generally, the older the program - the less likely it will be ICWS compatible. Reviews of Core War systems would be greatly appreciated in the newsgroup and in the newsletter. Below is a not necessarily complete or up-to-date list of what's available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu: MADgic41.lzh - corewar for the Amiga, v4.1 MAD4041.lzh - older version? MAD50B.lha - corewar for the Amiga, beta version 5.0 Redcoder-21.hqx - corewar for the Mac, supports ICWS'88 and '94 (without extensions) core-11.hqx - corewar for the Mac core-wars-simulator.hqx - same as core-11.hqx? corewar_unix_x11.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX/X-windows, ICWS'86 but not ICWS'88 compatible koth31.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX/X-windows. This program ran the former KotH server at intel.com koth.shar.Z - older version kothpc.zip - port of older version of KotH to the PC deluxe20c.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX (broken X-windows or curses) and PC mars.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX, likely not ICWS'88 compatible icons.zip - corewar icons for MS-Windows macrored.zip - a redcode macro-preprocessor (PC) c88v49.zip - PC corewar, textmode display mars88.zip - PC corewar, graphics mode display corwp302.zip - PC corewar, textmode display, slowish mercury2.zip - PC corewar written in assembly, fast! mtourn11.zip - tournament scheduler for mercury (req. 4DOS) pmars08s.zip - portable system, ICWS'88 and '94, runs on UNIX, PC, Mac, Amiga. C source archive pmars08s.tar.Z - same as above pmars08.zip - PC executables with graphics display, req 386+ macpmars02.sit.hqx - pMARS executable for Mac (port of version 0.2) buggy, no display MacpMARS1.99a.cpt.hqx - port of v0.8 for the Mac, with display and debugger MacpMARS1.0s.cpt.hqx - C source (MPW, ThinkC) for Mac frontend ApMARS03.lha - pMARS executable for Amiga (port of version 0.3.1) wincor11.zip - MS-Windows system, shareware ($15) [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ I do not have FTP. How do I get all this great stuff? There is an ftp email server at ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com. Send email with a subject and body text of "help" (without the quotes) for more information on its usage. If you don't have access to the net at all, send me a 3.5 '' diskette in a self-addressed disk mailer with postage and I will mail it back with an image of the Core War archives in PC format. My address is at the end of this post. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ I do not have access to Usenet. How do I post and receive news? To receive rec.games.corewar articles by email, join the COREWAR-L list run on the Stormking.Com list processor. To join, send the message SUB COREWAR-L FirstName LastName to listproc@stormking.com. You can send mail to corewar-l@stormking.com to post even if you are not a member of the list. Responsible for the listserver is Scott J. Ellentuch (tuc@stormking.com). Another server that allows you to post (but not receive) articles is available. Email your post to rec-games-corewar@cs.utexas.edu and it will be automatically posted for you. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Are there any Core War related WWW sites? You bet. Each of the two KotH sites sport a world-wide web server. Stormking's Core War page is ; pizza's is . A third WWW site is in Koeln, Germany: . Last but not least, Stephen Beitzel's "Unofficial Core War Page" is . All site are in varying stages of construction, so it would be futile to list here what they have to offer. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ When is the next tournament? The ICWS holds an annual tournament. Traditionally, the deadline for entering is the 15th of December. The EBS usually holds a preliminary tournament around the 15th of November and sends the top finishers on to the ICWS tournament. Informal double-elimination and other types of tournaments are held frequently among readers of the newsgroup; watch there for announcements or contact me. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is KotH? How do I enter? King Of The Hill (KotH) is an ongoing Core War tournament available to anyone with email. You enter by submitting via email a Redcode program (warrior) with special comment lines. You will receive a reply indicating how well your program did against the current top programs "on the hill". There are two styles of KotH tournaments, "classical" and "multi-warrior". The "classical" KotH is a one-on-one tournament, that is your warrior will play 100 battles against each of the 20 other programs currently on the Hill. You receive 3 points for each win and 1 point for each tie. (The existing programs do not replay each other, but their previous battles are recalled.) All scores are updated to reflect your battles and all 21 programs are ranked from high to low. If you are number 21 you are pushed off the Hill, if you are higher than 21 someone else is pushed off. In "multi-warrior" KotH, all warriors on the hill fight each other at the same time. Score calculation is a bit more complex than for the one-on-one tournament. Briefly, points are awarded based on how many warriors survive until the end of a round. A warrior that survives by itself gets more points than a warrior that survives together with other warriors. Points are calculated from the formula (W*W-1)/S, where W is the total number of warriors and S the number of surviving warriors. The pMARS documentation has more information on multi-warrior scoring. The idea for an email-based Core War server came from David Lee. The original KotH was developed and run by William Shubert at Intel starting in 1991, and discontinued after almost three years of service. Currently, KotHs based on Bill's UNIX scripts but offering a wider variety of hills are are running at two sites: "koth@stormking.com" is maintained by Scott J. Ellentuch (tuc@stormking.com) and "pizza@ecst.csuchico.edu" by Thomas H. Davies (sd@ecst.csuchico.edu). Up until May '95, the two sites provided overlapping services, i.e. the some of the hill types were offered by both "pizza" and "stormking". To conserve resources, the different hill types are now divided up among the sites. The way you submit warriors to both KotHs is pretty much the same. Therefore, the entry rules described below apply to both "pizza" and "stormking" unless otherwise noted. Entry rules for King of the Hill Corewar: 1) Write a corewar program. KotH is fully ICWS '88 compatible, EXCEPT that a comma (",") is required between two arguments. 2) Put a line starting with ";redcode" (or ";redcode-94, etc., see below) at the top of your program. This MUST be the first line. Anything before it will be lost. If you wish to receive mail on every new entrant, use ";redcode verbose". Otherwise you will only receive mail if a challenger makes it onto the hill. Use ";redcode quiet" if you wish to receive mail only when you get shoved off the hill. (Also, see 5 below). Additionally, adding ";name " and ";author " will be helpful in the performance reports. Do NOT have a line beginning with ";address" in your code; this will confuse the mail daemon and you won't get mail back. In addition, it would be nice if you have lines beginning with ";strategy" that describe the algorithm you use. There are currently seven separate hills you can select by starting your program with ;redcode-b, ;redcode-94, ;redcode-94x, ;redcode, ;redcode-icws, ;redcode-94m or ;redcode-94xm. The former three run at "pizza", the latter four at "stormking". More information on these hills is listed below. 3) Mail this file to koth@stormking.com or pizza@ecst.csuchico.edu. "Pizza" requires a subject of "koth" (use the -s flag on most mailers). 4) Within a few minutes you should get mail back telling you whether your program assembled correctly or not. If it did assemble correctly, sit back and wait; if not, make the change required and re-submit. 5) In an hour or so you should get more mail telling you how your program performed against the current top 20 (or 10) programs. If no news arrives during that time, don't worry; entries are put in a queue and run through the tournament one at a time. A backlog may develop. Be patient. If your program makes it onto the hill, you will get mail every time a new program makes it onto the hill. If this is too much mail, you can use ";redcode[-??] quiet" when you first mail in your program; then you will only get mail when you make it on the top 20 list or when you are knocked off. Using ";redcode[-??] verbose" will give you even more mail; here you get mail every time a new challenger arrives, even if they don't make it onto the top 20 list. Often programmers want to try out slight variations in their programs. If you already have a program named "foo V1.0" on the hill, adding the line ";kill foo" to a new program will automatically bump foo 1.0 off the hill. Just ";kill" will remove all of your programs when you submit the new one. The server kills programs by assigning an impossibly low score; it may therefore take another successful challenge before a killed program is actually removed from the hill. SAMPLE ENTRY: ;redcode ;name Dwarf ;author A. K. Dewdney ;strategy Throw DAT bombs around memory, hitting every 4th memory cell. ;strategy This program was presented in the first Corewar article. bomb DAT #0 dwarf ADD #4, bomb MOV bomb, @bomb JMP dwarf END dwarf ; Programs start at the first line unless ; an "END start" pseudo-op appears to indicate ; the first logical instruction. Also, nothing ; after the END instruction will be assembled. Here are the Specs for the various hills: ICWS'88 Standard Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode", available at "stormking") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: ICWS '88 ICWS Annual Tournament Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-icws", available at "stormking") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8192 instructions max. processes: 8000 per program duration: After 100,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 300 minimum distance: 300 instruction set: ICWS '88 ICWS'94 Draft Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94", available at "pizza") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft ICWS'94 Beginner's Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-b", available at "pizza") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft max. age: after 100 successful challenges, warriors are retired. ICWS'94 Experimental (Big) Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94x", available at "pizza") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 55440 max. processes: 10000 duration: after 500,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 200 minimum distance: 200 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft ICWS'94 Draft Multi-Warrior Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94m", available at "stormking") hillsize: 10 warriors rounds: 200 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft ICWS'94 Experimental (Big) Multi-Warrior Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94xm", available at "stormking") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 55440 max. processes: 10000 duration: after 500,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 200 minimum distance: 200 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft If you just want to get a status report without actually challenging the hills, send email with ";status" as the message body (and don't forget "Subject: koth" for "pizza"). If you send mail to "pizza" with "Subject: koth help" you will receive instructions that may be more up to date than those contained in this document. At stormking, a message body with ";help" will return brief instructions. If you submit code containing a ";test" line, your warrior will be assembled but not actually pitted against the warriors on the hill. All hills run portable MARS (pMARS) version 0.8, a platform-independent corewar system available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. The '94 and '94x hills allow three experimental opcodes and addressing modes currently not covered in the ICWS'94 draft document: SEQ - Skip if EQual (synonym for CMP) SNE - Skip if Not Equal NOP - (No OPeration) * - indirect using A-field as pointer { - predecrement indirect using A-field } - postincrement indirect using A-field [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Is it DAT 0, 0 or DAT #0, #0? How do I compare to core? Core is initialized to DAT 0, 0. This is an "illegal" instruction under ICWS'88 rules and strictly compliant assemblers (such as KotH or pmars -8) will not let you write a DAT 0, 0 instruction - only DAT #0, #0. So this begs the question, how to compare something to see if it is empty core. The answer is, most likely the instruction before your first instruction and the instruction after your last instruction are both DAT 0, 0. You can use them, or any other likely unmodified instructions, for comparison. Note that under ICWS'94, DAT 0, 0 is a legal instruction. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ How does SLT (Skip if Less Than) work? SLT gives some people trouble because of the way modular arithmetic works. It is important to note that all negative numbers are converted to positive numbers before a battles begins. Example: (-1) becomes (M - 1) where M is the memory size. Once you realize that all numbers are treated as positive, it is clear what is meant by "less than". It should also be clear that no number is less than zero. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is the difference between in-register and in-memory evaluation? These terms refer to the way instruction operands are evaluated. The '88 Redcode standard ICWS'88 is unclear about whether a simulator should "buffer" the result of A-operand evaluation before the B-operand is evaluated. Simulators that do buffer are said to use in-register evaluation, those that don't, in-memory evaluation. ICWS'94 clears this confusion by mandating in-register evaluation. Instructions that execute differently under these two forms of evaluation are MOV, ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV and MOD where the effective address of the A-operand is modified by evaluation of the B-operand. This is best illustrated by an example: L1 mov L2, mov.i #0,impsize Bootstrapping Strategy of copying the active portion of the program away from the initial location, leaving a decoy behind and making the relocated program as small as possible. B-Scanners Scanners which only recognize non-zero B-fields. example add #10,scan scan jmz example,10 C Measure of speed, equal to one location per cycle. Speed of light. CMP-Scanner A Scanner which uses a CMP instruction to look for opponents. example add step,scan scan cmp 10,30 jmp attack jmp example step dat #20,#20 Color Property of bombs making them visible to scanners, causing them to attack useless locations, thus slowing them down. example dat #100 Core-Clear code that sequentially overwrites core with DAT instructions; usually the last part of a program. Decoys Bogus or unused instructions meant to slow down Scanners. Typically, DATs with non-zero B-fields. DJN-Stream (also DJN-Train) Using a DJN command to rapidly decrement core locations. example ... ... djn example,<4000 Dwarf the prototypical small bomber. Gate-busting (also gate-crashing) technique to "interweave" a decrement-resistant imp-spiral (e.g. MOV 0, 2668) with a standard one to overrun imp-gates. Hybrids warriors that combine two or more of the basic strategies, either in sequence (e.g. stone->paper) or in parallel (e.g. imp/stone). Imp Program which only uses the MOV instruction. example MOV 0, 1 or example MOV 0, 2 MOV 0, 2 Imp-Gate A location in core which is bombed or decremented continuously so that an Imp can not pass. Also used to describe the program-code which maintains the gate. example ... ... SPL 0, mov.i #0,impsize Mirror see reflection. On-axis/off-axis On-axis scanners compare two locations M/2 apart, where M is the memory size. Off-axis scanners use some other separation. Optimal Constants (also optima-type constants) Bomb or scan increments chosen to cover core most effectively, i.e. leaving gaps of uniform size. Programs to calculate optimal constants and lists of optimal numbers are available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. Paper A Paper-like program. One which replicates itself many times. Part of the Scissors (beats) Paper (beats) Stone (beats Scissors) analogy. Pit-Trapper (also Slaver, Vampire). A program which enslaves another. Usually accomplished by bombing with JMPs to a SPL 0 pit with an optional core-clear routine. Quick Scan 2c scan of a set group of core locations with bombing if anything is found. Both of the following codes snips scan 16 locations and check for a find. If anything is found, it is attacked, otherwise 16 more locations are scanned. Example: start s1 for 8 ;'88 scan cmp start+100*s1, start+100*s1+4000 ;check two locations mov #start+100*s1-found, found ;they differ so set pointer rof jmn attack, found ;if we have something, get it s2 for 8 cmp start+100*(s2+6), start+100*(s2+6)+4000 mov #start+100*(s2+6)-found, found rof found jmz moveme, #0 ;skip attack if qscan found nothing attack cmp @found, start-1 ;does found points to empty space? add #4000, found ;no, so point to correct location mov start-1, @found ;move a bomb moveme jmp 0, 0 In ICWS'94, the quick scan code is more compact because of the SNE opcode: start ;'94 scan s1 for 4 sne start+400*s1, start+400*s1+100 ;check two locations seq start+400*s1+200, start+400*s1+300 ;check two locations mov #start+400*s1-found, found ;they differ so set pointer rof jmn which, found ;if we have something, get it s2 for 4 sne start+400*(s2+4), start+400*(s2+4)+100 seq start+400*(s2+4)+200, start+400*(s2+4)+300 mov #start+400*(s2+4)-found-100, found rof found jmz moveme, #0 ;skip attack if qscan found nothing add #100, -1 ;increment pointer till we get the which jmn -1, @found ;right place mov start-1, @found ;move a bomb moveme jmp 0, 0 Reflection Copy of a program or program part, positioned to make the active program invisible to a CMP-scanner. Replicator Generic for Paper. A program which makes many copies of itself, each copy also making copies. Self-Splitting Strategy of amplifying the number of processes executing a piece of code. example SPL 0 loop ADD #10, example MOV example, @example JMP loop Scanner A program which searches through core for an opponent rather than bombing blindly. Scissors A program designed to beat replicators, usually a (B-field scanning) vampire. Part of the Paper-Scissors-Stone analogy. Self-Repair Ability of a program to fix it's own code after attack. Silk A replicator which splits off a process to each new copy before actually copying the code. This allows it to replicate extremely quickly. This technique is only possible under the '94 draft, because it requires post-increment indirect addressing. Example: spl 1 mov.i -1, 0 spl 1 ;generate 6 consecutive processes silk spl 3620, #0 ;split to new copy mov.i >-1, }-1 ;copy self to new location mov.i bomb, >2000 ;linear bombing mov.i bomb, }2042 ;A-indirect bombing for anti-vamp jmp silk, {silk ;reset source pointer, make new copy bomb dat.f >2667, >5334 ;anti-imp bomb Slaver see Pit-Trapper. Stealth Property of programs, or program parts, which are invisible to scanners, accomplished by using zero B-fields and reflections. Stone A Stone-like program designed to be a small bomber. Part of the Paper-Scissors-Stone analogy. Stun A type of bomb which makes the opponent multiply useless processes, thus slowing it down. Example is referred to as a spl-jmp bomb. example spl 0 jmp -1 Two-Pass Core-Clear (also spl/dat Core-Clear) core clear that fills core first with SPL instructions, then with DATs. This is very effective in killing paper and certain imp-spiral variations. Vampire see Pit-Trapper. Vector Launch one of several means to start an imp-spiral running. As fast as Binary Launch, but requiring much less code. See also JMP/ADD Launch and Binary Launch. This example is one form of a Vector Launch: impsize equ 2667 example spl 1 ; extend by adding more spl 1's spl 1 djn.a @imp,#0 ; jmp @ a series of pointers dat #0,imp+(3*impsize) dat #0,imp+(2*impsize) dat #0,imp+(1*impsize) dat #0,imp+(0*impsize) imp mov.i #0,impsize [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Other questions? Just ask in the rec.games.corewar newsgroup or contact me (address below). If you are shy, check out the Core War archives first to see if your question has been answered before. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Credits Additions, corrections, etc. to this document are solicited. Thanks in particular to the following people who have contributed major portions of this document: Paul Kline, Randy Graham. Mark Durham wrote the first version of the FAQ. The rec.games.corewar FAQ is Copyright 1995 and maintained by: Stefan Strack, PhD stst@vuse.vanderbilt.edu Dept. Molecular Physiol. and Biophysics stst@idnsun.gpct.vanderbilt.edu Rm. 762, MRB-1 stracks@vuctrvax.bitnet Vanderbilt Univ. Medical Center Voice: +615-322-4389 Nashville, TN 37232-6600, USA FAX: +615-322-7236 _________________________________________________________________ $Id: corewar-faq.html,v 3.6 1995/10/12 22:44:37 stst Exp stst $ From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Corewar HoF update?? Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <6nsmlc$59m$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, rcoleman@erinet.com wrote >Is this link as current as it gets for the Corewar HoF?? > >http://www.public.asu.edu/~sieben/cwhof/cwhof.htm Yes :-( Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ | http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/spectrum.htm | | New? Read the FAQ: http://www.kendalls.demon.co.uk/cssfaq/ | \ Looking for something?: http://www.void.demon.nl/archive.html / From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <35a28074.9306005@news.aon.at>, Beowolf wrote > >I messed arround with corewars some jears ago and always wanted to >make my own compiler/emuulator for it (no interpreter...). Then I >forgot about it... >Now I'm working on some multiprozessor emulation routines and thought >that making a redcode compiler/emulator would be a nice way to get >some experience. > >So here's my question : Is there a need for such a thingy for Win >95/98? Not really - pMARS works just fine :-) (So long as you get the DJGPP compiled version from the pMARS homepage!). To be honest, I don't really understand what you're trying to write: you're never going to be able to write something which compiles Redcode to 80x86 protected mode assembly code (consider self-modifying code...), and what's the difference between an emulator and an interpreter? Don't let this put you off though - if you feel like writing one, do so! Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: Paul Kline Subject: Re: new hill Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: <35A37437.622C32C5@drake.edu>#1/1 jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu wrote: > Well. Let's say we changed max size to 4000, or CORESIZE/2. If one opponent > used code such as this: > > i for 2000 > dat i,i > rof > ;insert warrior here :-) > i for 1990 > dat i,i > rof > >There would be absolutely no point in qscanning, And no point to any other kind of scanning. Paul From: "John K. Lewis" Subject: Re: div bomb Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: #1/1 There was talk about it awhile ago. It has one or two problems. 1) It can turn into a none killing code. DAT can't. 2) You have to carry the bomb with you, DAT's are free in core. Aside from these issues, there are no real advantages to useing them and I think few do. John Lewis cgbean@alaska.net wrote: : I was wondering if anyone ever uses a DIV bomb- : either kills off the process if it divides by 0, or mess up their values : if not. : Is division by 0 still illegal in '94? Thanks. : -WFB < john k. lewis > < jklewis@umich.edu > < apple > < sig.virus 2.3 > From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: div bomb Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: <35A2F647.2E47@alaska.net>#1/1 I was wondering if anyone ever uses a DIV bomb- either kills off the process if it divides by 0, or mess up their values if not. Is division by 0 still illegal in '94? Thanks. -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: help Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: <35A2F5DC.1878@alaska.net>#1/1 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------2E9518196FC9 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Okay, apparently I know no more about RedCode now then a month ago...oh well. I started a supposedly simple warrior to work on while waiting for the results of another variant of Swarm to come back to me. It was supposed to be my first warrior that would stand any chance against a paper. Pretty much all it is is a two-pass coreclear, spl 0&jmp -1/dat. Unfourtuntly, I've had no coffee today, and can't think straight... for some reason it ends up bombing itself with the spl bomb. I really hope this is something simple, not a huge error...since the code isn't commented, I'll describe it here- It starts immediately, throwing out its spl/jmp bomb (later on i'll boot, giving the nasty papers time to spread, and ensuring one will live to the dat clear). I also have 89 lines of dat 1,1 's behind me, for a decoy and something to stop my djn stream. I don't have an idea how 2 pass cc's usually work, so I figured I should use a djn, which will monitor a address behind me. The spl bomb is a spl #1, so I thought that when it was placed on the address watched by the djn, the djn would get a value of 0, and pass control onto the rest of the program. Then, the warrior would split, one process laying down a djn-stream going fowards, the other doing a core clear backwards, until the end of the round. When I run this, the spl coreclear works, but it goes right pass my djn-watched address, and hits me. Then, it stops (I guess it overwrote the mov's), and I do a short bombing run somewhere in the middle of the core. As usual, I have absolutely no idea what is going on, and would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me. Thanks. -WFB --------------2E9518196FC9 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; name="1man.red" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline; filename="1man.red" ;redcode-b ;name 1-Man ;author WFB ;strategy Need...coffee...ugh. ;assert CORESIZE==8000 start mov bomb1,@ptr mov bomb2,-56 spl 2,<-1000 djn <0,<-10 mov 10,>10 jmp -1,<-100 bomb1 spl #1,<-2667 bomb2 jmp -1,<2667 ptr dat #100,#100 dec for 89 dat 1,1 rof end start --------------2E9518196FC9-- From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/08 Message-ID: <35A2D630.1AB0@alaska.net>#1/1 Beowolf wrote: > > Hi everybody! > > (sorry, my english is bad... I'm from Austria) > I messed arround with corewars some jears ago and always wanted to > make my own compiler/emuulator for it (no interpreter...). Then I > forgot about it... > Now I'm working on some multiprozessor emulation routines and thought > that making a redcode compiler/emulator would be a nice way to get > some experience. > > So here's my question : Is there a need for such a thingy for Win > 95/98? > Umm...probably not. If a compiled version of a redocde warrior would do what I think it would, that wouldn't be a good idea. Then again, we could send it to that spammer- Hello there! Free MechWarrior tips for you list! Just double click on the self-extracting exe! I think that would take care of him...heh heh. Anyhow, I guess theres no stopping you form making a cimpiler, but you'd have to ask one of the more experienced people around here if there's a need. -WFB From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: pmars graphics under win95 Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <199807091953.PAA27913@valhalla.stormking.com>#1/1 >: Humm. But do we have a pMars that has a working graphical display under >: 95/98? (besides java) If you were willing to forgo the compiler idea > >Yes, it's on my web page. The next release of pmars should include it. The >problem is, we wanted to release it more than a year ago. I don't know >where Stefan is. Yeah I announced this to r.g.c about 2 months ago. Maybe it bears repeating, though. Go to www.koth.org/pmars or math.la.asu.edu/~sieben to download a version of pmars (pmarsv.zip) which will run in graphics mode under Win95... -jkw From: jerome@uni-paderborn.de Subject: JAVA MARS ? Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <199807091502.RAA19802@chrysantheme.uni-paderborn.de>#1/1 Hi there, i am quite new to core wars and would like to know if there exists a java version of pmars or so. I am interested in writing one, but if there's already a good one out there, seems pointless. I am thinking more of a graphical debugger than a powerful fight simulator, because Jave still isn't the fastest option ;-) The Advantage would be the portability) ciao, Jerome jerome@uni-paderborn.de From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <199807081829.OAA18884@valhalla.stormking.com>#1/1 >Ah well, maybe we could COMPILE the warriors and then run them in an >EMULATED redcode processor :) Wouldn't that be redundant :) Why don't we just forgo having a mars altogether and just run the battles by hand? -jkw From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Imp-Stones Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <19980708234157.15168.rocketmail@send1a.yahoomail.com>#1/1 How the hell do Imp-Stones to score in self-fight??? == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <199807082332.TAA23127@valhalla.stormking.com>#1/1 >To be honest, I don't really understand what you're trying to write: >you're never going to be able to write something which compiles Redcode >to 80x86 protected mode assembly code (consider self-modifying code...), >and what's the difference between an emulator and an interpreter? > >Don't let this put you off though - if you feel like writing one, do so! Heh. Whip out the ol' VHDL programs, and buy yourself a few big Xilinx chips and export the whole thing to hardware. Heh. From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Re: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <19980708232115.762.rocketmail@send1e.yahoomail.com>#1/1 ---Beowolf wrote: > > Hi everybody! > > > (sorry, my english is bad... I'm from Austria) > I messed arround with corewars some jears ago and ^Typo?^ >always wanted to > make my own compiler/emuulator for it (no interpreter...). Then I > forgot about it... > Now I'm working on some multiprozessor emulation >routines and thought > that making a redcode compiler/emulator would be a >nice way to get > some experience. > > So here's my question : Is there a need for such a >thingy for Win > 95/98? Why not? It'd be cool! > > MfG > > Alex > == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: sieben@imap1.asu.edu Subject: Re: Need fo a Win95/98 redcode emulator? Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <6o1eud$ro6$2@news.asu.edu>#1/1 : Humm. But do we have a pMars that has a working graphical display under : 95/98? (besides java) If you were willing to forgo the compiler idea Yes, it's on my web page. The next release of pmars should include it. The problem is, we wanted to release it more than a year ago. I don't know where Stefan is. Nandor. From: sieben@imap1.asu.edu Subject: Re: Corewar HoF update?? Date: 1998/07/09 Message-ID: <6o1elg$ro6$1@news.asu.edu>#1/1 : >Is this link as current as it gets for the Corewar HoF?? : > : >http://www.public.asu.edu/~sieben/cwhof/cwhof.htm : Yes :-( Sorry guys. I AM still working on it, but very slowly. The truth is, I thought there were no interest, that's why I am not so enthusiastic. I have two pictures on my HD waiting to be added to the page though. Nandor. From: Paul Kline Subject: Re: help Date: 1998/07/10 Message-ID: <35A61B18.5D6C1335@drake.edu>#1/1 cgbean@alaska.net wrote: You seem to be confused about which operand instructions are impacting. add #3,ptr and djn -3,>-56 are both impacting the b-operand of their targets, not the a-operand. So the b-operand of 'ptr' is incremented by 3 each time, and the b-operand of '-56' is decremented by the djn (your bomb has a 1 in the a-operand only). Paul Kline pk6811s@acad.drake.edu > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > ;redcode-b > ;name 1-Man > ;author WFB > ;strategy Need...coffee...ugh. > ;assert CORESIZE==8000 > start mov bomb1,@ptr > mov bomb2, add #3,ptr > djn -3,>-56 > spl 2,<-1000 > djn <0,<-10 > mov 10,>10 > jmp -1,<-100 > bomb1 spl #1,<-2667 > bomb2 jmp -1,<2667 > ptr dat #100,#100 > dec for 89 > dat 1,1 > rof > end start From: "Brian Haskin" Subject: Re: JAVA MARS ? Date: 1998/07/10 Message-ID: <002801bdab9a$2d3679a0$0b00000a@brianjr.haskin.org>#1/1 I have one, you can get it at http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/4333/jmars.html . At this point it is a just barely functioning mars and needs a lot of work especially in the frontend. Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated. Brian Haskin haskin@ptway.com p.s. Getting the applet code working again would be a nice area to get working and I think should be a fairly simple project to start with and familiarize yourself with the code a little. From: Paul Kline Subject: Re: Imp-Stones Date: 1998/07/10 Message-ID: <35A684FB.B6262260@drake.edu>#1/1 Paul-V Khuong wrote: > How the hell do Imp-Stones to score in self-fight??? By following the stone's bombing sequence with a dclear core wipe. If the opposing imp has not gotten too long by that time it can be killed. Paul Kline pk6811s@acad.drake.edu From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Pizza Date: 1998/07/11 Message-ID: <35A7FDFA.4578@alaska.net>#1/1 UH oh...is Pizza down AGAIN? -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: help Date: 1998/07/11 Message-ID: <35A7FDA5.73E7@alaska.net>#1/1 Paul Kline wrote: > > cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > You seem to be confused about which operand instructions are impacting. > > add #3,ptr > and > djn -3,>-56 > > are both impacting the b-operand of their targets, not the a-operand. > So the b-operand of 'ptr' is incremented by 3 each time, and the > b-operand of '-56' is decremented by the djn (your bomb has a 1 in > the a-operand only). > Yes, I figured that out after much head banging...thanks. -WFB From: phil@pknight.demon.co.uk (Phil Knight) Subject: Re: pmars graphics under win95 Date: 1998/07/11 Message-ID: <900188390.17378.0.nnrp-05.9e987dc5@news.demon.co.uk>#1/1 guenzel.p1@usa.net (Bjoern Guenzel) wrote: >On 9 Jul 1998 20:39:42 -0400, jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu wrote: >>Go to www.koth.org/pmars or math.la.asu.edu/~sieben to download a version of >>pmars >>(pmarsv.zip) which will run in graphics mode under Win95... >> >>-jkw >Whereas I have to say that I couldn't get that version to run under NT >(can't remember if I tried Win 95)... But since for others it seems to >work, it's probably just one of those mysterious problems... Me neither, but I've spent most of today installing djgpp on my machine and recompiling the pmars source. I've now got a working graphics version under NT... but the debugger is soooooo incredibly slow at responding to keyboard input, i.e. press a key and more often than not it isn't picked up at all. Can anyone who is familiar with the code make any suggestions as to what may need changing? -- Phil Knight From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Imp-Stones Date: 1998/07/11 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <35A684FB.B6262260@drake.edu>, Paul Kline wrote >Paul-V Khuong wrote: > >> How the hell do Imp-Stones to score in self-fight??? > >By following the stone's bombing sequence with a dclear core wipe. >If the opposing imp has not gotten too long by that time it can >be killed. And by quite often following a Q^2 :-) Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: Planar Subject: Olympic report 1998-07-11 Date: 1998/07/11 Message-ID: <6o7ljr$7h3@news-rocq.inria.fr>#1/1 These are the warriors from round 7 of the Redcode Maniacs Tournament. The rules of this round were: Normal redcode '94, but wins get 1 point, losses and ties get 0 point. Congratulations to David, Ilmari and Robert. We're seeing a lot of change at the top of the hill. >>> 278 *qbomber v .569 39/ 40/ 21 162 138.50 >>> 11 *LeatherNeck 58/ 13/ 29 1013 204.10 >>> 2 *Smarty 65/ 18/ 17 1014 211.03 >>> 137 *Alladin's Ring 48/ 38/ 14 81 158.34 >>> 277 *cute 38/ 38/ 23 109 138.72 >>> 3 *Three Musketeers 67/ 23/ 10 1017 210.64 >>> 625 *Bubbles 31/ 45/ 25 165 116.76 >>> 1 *Recycled Bits-- 70/ 19/ 11 1019 220.34 >>> 132 *Spring Tides 48/ 35/ 17 99 161.82 >>> 43 *Interlaced 0 57/ 17/ 27 1021 196.52 >>> 182 *Invisigoth 45/ 42/ 13 114 147.69 >>> 548 *Kobald Killer 30/ 36/ 35 177 123.25 -- Planar Remove ".gov" from my address. From: guenzel.p1@usa.net (Bjoern Guenzel) Subject: Re: pmars graphics under win95 Date: 1998/07/11 Message-ID: <35a731b7.2692721@news.lrz-muenchen.de>#1/1 On 9 Jul 1998 20:39:42 -0400, jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu wrote: >>: Humm. But do we have a pMars that has a working graphical display under >>: 95/98? (besides java) If you were willing to forgo the compiler idea >> >>Yes, it's on my web page. The next release of pmars should include it. The >>problem is, we wanted to release it more than a year ago. I don't know >>where Stefan is. > >Yeah I announced this to r.g.c about 2 months ago. Maybe it bears >repeating, though. > >Go to www.koth.org/pmars or math.la.asu.edu/~sieben to download a version of >pmars >(pmarsv.zip) which will run in graphics mode under Win95... > >-jkw Whereas I have to say that I couldn't get that version to run under NT (can't remember if I tried Win 95)... But since for others it seems to work, it's probably just one of those mysterious problems... Bjoern From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Re: hills Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <19980712035117.2161.rocketmail@send1a.yahoomail.com>#1/1 ---cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > > Maybe we should swap some hills. Put the most used on KotH, the least > used on Pizza. Semms Pizza is down a lot... Doesn't matter for me as i'm starting to play '88 > -WFB > > == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Gate crashing imps Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <19980712145757.820.rocketmail@send1c.yahoomail.com>#1/1 How do you launch the imps? I mean, in what order, wich one executes first, etc. Is it possible to do something like: 2668 imps ...(4 lines) 2667 imps ...(4 lines) 2668 imps ...(4 lines) This would survive increment or decrement gates... == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: pmars graphics under win95 Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <199807120405.AAA20373@valhalla.stormking.com>#1/1 >>>Go to www.koth.org/pmars or math.la.asu.edu/~sieben to download a version of >>>pmars >>>(pmarsv.zip) which will run in graphics mode under Win95... > >>Whereas I have to say that I couldn't get that version to run under NT >>(can't remember if I tried Win 95)... But since for others it seems to >>work, it's probably just one of those mysterious problems... In addition to running it under win95, I also ran it on NT 4 at a computer lab. It had a few small bugs involving screen refreshes, but it did work... From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Seeking FAQ... Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <1y3S2GA0ETq1EwIc@kendalls.demon.co.uk>#1/1 In article <6oastd$fvh$1@heliodor.xara.net>, Haarg2 wrote >Can someone please point me to a copy of the Corewar FAQ? An old copy of the FAQ was posted here 4 days ago, so I assume you picked that up, but an updated copy is maintained by Anton Marsden at: http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~amarsden/ >Is there some tutorial or something I should read? Try Steve Bailey's 'Guide for Beginners' (available from http://www.koth.org/) and Ilmari Karonen's 'Beginner's Guide to Redcode' (http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/corewar/guide.html). >Do I need to learn normal ASM in order to understand Redcode? Not really, but experience of languages more than BASIC helps :-) HTH Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: Seeking FAQ... Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <35A93592.638D@alaska.net>#1/1 > > Can someone please point me to a copy of the Corewar FAQ? One is posted here every 2 weeks, and is avalaible at the following site. > The only stuff I know is from a short article in an old copy of Scientific > American that I found. Pretty interesting, isn't it? > Is there some tutorial or something I should read? Yes! Go to http://www.koth.org . Every thing you need should be there. You can get the intrepreter/simulator called pMARS, and there's links to some good documents. Suggested reading: Ilmari Karonen's Guide For Beginners, The Core War FAQ, My First Core War Book by Steven Morell, Steve's Guide for beginners, Intro to Art in '88, and back issues of the e-zine Core Warrior. Read these, as well as anything else you can get your hands on. Do I need to learn normal > ASM in order to understand Redcode? No, but if you already know it it will help. Redcode can be rather difficult to learn, but if you have experience programming, it shouldn't be to hard (though it is rather different from other languages-self modifying and rather abstract). > Any help much appreciated. If you have any other questions, just post them on this newsgroup. At least one of the nice people here will answer it. -WFB From: John.Metcalf@p18.f94.chaos.camelot.co.uk (John Metcalf) Subject: Core Warrior Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: #1/1 Greetings... Would someone be able to post the last part of Core Warrior issue #68 to me please (from the diagram onwards) since it didn't arrive here properly. Many thanks, John From: "Haarg2" Subject: Seeking FAQ... Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <6oastd$fvh$1@heliodor.xara.net>#1/1 Can someone please point me to a copy of the Corewar FAQ? The only stuff I know is from a short article in an old copy of Scientific American that I found. Is there some tutorial or something I should read? Do I need to learn normal ASM in order to understand Redcode? Any help much appreciated. From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: hills Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <35A81372.4200@alaska.net>#1/1 Maybe we should swap some hills. Put the most used on KotH, the least used on Pizza. Semms Pizza is down a lot... -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: p-space Date: 1998/07/12 Message-ID: <35A8118B.329B@alaska.net>#1/1 Well, even though I hate p-space, I gotta use it. My last few warriors have used other people's engines, instead of me making them by scratch, that's why they aren't as bad. Oh well. I wan't to p-space together a bomber, Swarm, and a silk, Snots. I stole the p-space code from one of Beppe's hints (I guess it isn't really stealing...). I must have done SOMETHING wrong...please tell me what. Thanks. -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: suggestions Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <35AA9FFF.116F@alaska.net>#1/1 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------4F182D2B2C39 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Woohoo! I got 100 on the -94nop hill! With More Snotty CSnots! Dang, I've posted a lot of messages...one would think I have nothing better to do...=). Anyhow, I was wondering if I could get some suggestions for improving my silk. I guess that I'd do much better if I had something to help me defeat those dang stone/imps, and kill off more imps in particular (every battle against the Fugitive was a tie, with the exception of 1-and he won...). I've been looking through old warriors and Core Warrior back-issues, but I have no idea where to start. Pretty much, it uses TimeScape's engine (no coincedence that my first semi-decent warrior uses someone elses engine...), as presented in Core Warrior 3 by Beppe Bezzi, with the exception that I added one more little copying module. That scored 99. Then I read about CCPaper (sp? name?), and decided to add a coreclear to it. It scores slightly better against warriors like Sphere, Torcht18 (sp?), Alien, and Iron Gate. In fact, it beat all those warriors...maybe with some help, I could get those 20 points needed...TIA! -WFB --------------4F182D2B2C39 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; name="csnotty.red" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline; filename="csnotty.red" ;redcode-b ;name More Snotty CSnots ;author WFB ;strategy What Snots! ;assert CORESIZE==8000 start spl 1,<-200 mov -1,0 spl 1,<-800 mov -1,0 s1 spl @0,}1100 ;experimenting with values-original is 1100 mov }-1,>-1 s2 spl @0,<2620 ;original is 2620 mov }-1,>-1 s3 spl @0,{1870 ;original value is 1870 mov }-1,>-1 mov snot,<88 ;88 s4 mov {-3,<1 spl @0,}-639 ;-639 mov 2,<-4 jmp -1,<-13 snot dat <-2667,<2667 end start --------------4F182D2B2C39-- From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: Empty group ? Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <35AA7CD7.73D0@alaska.net>#1/1 Paul Kline wrote: > > Sebastien SAUVAGE wrote: > > > > Empty group ? shame shame... > > > > It only appears empty because your service provider purges messages > too quickly. > > And because this group usually slows down during the summer. > Obviously so.... -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: vampire Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <35AA7AEA.6018@alaska.net>#1/1 Sorry to bother everyone AGAIN....this time I'm wondering about vampires. Now, please forgive any foolish words below, I am but a newbie... Are there any major reasons for vampires becoming less effective inn the '94 standard besides a-indirect bombing? Did vampires become just to big? Would it help a vampire to use JMP @0,trap? Is that what is already used? A-indirect bombing would hit just that instruction, right? And is it MyVamp which does well in '94? Why? Thanks for any info you could provide! Ps-On another subject altogether, does anyone have any plans for making a optimization proggy just for papers? Does one already exist? Would have some tricky math stuff, but seems feasible... -WFB From: Paul Kline Subject: Re: Gate crashing imps Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <35AA5AAC.4C9BF052@drake.edu>#1/1 Paul-V Khuong wrote: > > How do you launch the imps? > I mean, in what order, wich one executes first, etc. > Is it possible to do something like: > > 2668 imps > ...(4 lines) > 2667 imps > ...(4 lines) > 2668 imps > ...(4 lines) > > This would survive increment or decrement gates... > Gate-crashing imps are only effective against these old-style gates: spl 0,#1/1 Hello all. I guess I should be more patient and wait for the return of Pizza's funcionality, but I was wondering what score you think I'll get on the -B hill with my newest failure, the Snot series. Boy, now I love silks! I couldn't possibly do '88 and leave my new-found friends behind....anyways, the best of the Snots, More Nasty Snots, got 99 points on the 94nop hill, with the same warriors, except C^3 was on in last place instead of Sphere, I believe. Soooo, any ideas on what I'll get on the -b hill? Thanks, WFB From: Paul Kline Subject: Re: Empty group ? Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <35AA59EF.38A4300F@drake.edu>#1/1 Sebastien SAUVAGE wrote: > > Empty group ? shame shame... > It only appears empty because your service provider purges messages too quickly. And because this group usually slows down during the summer. Paul Kline pk6811s@acad.drake.edu From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - 94 No Pspace 07/13/98 Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <199807130400.AAA20500@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/13/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG 94 No Pspace CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 12 18:48:39 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 35/ 28/ 37 Fixed Ken Espiritu 142 34 2 40/ 39/ 21 The Machine Anton Marsden 141 40 3 44/ 46/ 10 Red Carpet David Moore 141 8 4 34/ 28/ 38 Baseline Plus Ken Espiritu 139 32 5 25/ 11/ 64 The Fugitive David Moore 138 53 6 33/ 29/ 38 Newt Ian Oversby 137 52 7 32/ 28/ 40 Vain Ian Oversby 136 51 8 30/ 25/ 44 Gemini Dream John K Wilkinson 136 57 9 33/ 30/ 37 Head or Tail Christian Schmidt 136 22 10 30/ 26/ 43 Freight Train v0.2 David Moore 134 15 11 30/ 27/ 43 Pulp v0.4 Ian Oversby 133 50 12 35/ 38/ 27 Sphere Christian Schmidt 133 1 13 39/ 46/ 16 Eggbeater Anton Marsden 132 41 14 33/ 35/ 33 Alien Christian Schmidt 131 28 15 29/ 29/ 42 Faces 0.1 Csaba Biro 129 2 16 31/ 34/ 35 Shadow Christian Schmidt 128 9 17 36/ 44/ 20 Scanther Christian Schmidt 128 18 18 29/ 33/ 38 Torch t18 P.Kline 125 54 19 22/ 20/ 58 Return Of Return Of The J John K W 124 55 20 34/ 47/ 19 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 121 45 21 2/ 2/ 0 C^3 Christian Schmidt 7 21 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - MultiWarrior 94 07/13/98 Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <199807130400.AAA20487@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/13/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Multiwarrior 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 12 18:27:33 EDT 1998 # Name Author Score Age 1 aTest 4 P. Kline 5014 4 2 CyberBunny Compudemon 5014 14 3 Failure John Metcalf 5014 9 4 U-lat v3.8 Zul Nadzri 5014 27 5 Aulder Man Ian Oversby 5014 49 6 mTest P. Kline 5014 10 7 aTest 4 P. Kline 5014 5 8 Fleas 2 Mike M. 5014 2 9 Time to send in the imps Robert Hale 4990 20 10 paper test Ken Espiritu 4990 1 11 Ultra Ken Espiritu 4978 16 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - ICWS Experimental 94 07/13/98 Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <199807130400.AAA20491@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/13/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG ICWS Experimental 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Fri Jun 19 19:00:47 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 41/ 12/ 47 Venom v0.2b Christian Schmidt 171 16 2 32/ 5/ 63 Evol Cap 4 X John Wilkinson 160 63 3 29/ 3/ 69 Evolve X v4.0 John Wilkinson 155 11 4 34/ 14/ 52 Rosebud Beppe 155 42 5 40/ 36/ 25 Dr. Gate X Franz 144 34 6 36/ 34/ 30 BigBoy Robert Macrae 139 88 7 38/ 37/ 25 13 Christian Schmidt 138 1 8 28/ 19/ 53 Purple v0.1 Christian Schmidt 138 15 9 26/ 14/ 60 Sphere v0.2 Christian Schmidt 138 5 10 41/ 47/ 12 S.E.T.I. 4-X JKW 136 64 11 37/ 40/ 23 Stepping Stone 94x Kurt Franke 133 49 12 38/ 43/ 20 Tsunami v0.1 Ian Oversby 132 41 13 33/ 33/ 34 Lithium X 8 John K Wilkinson 132 54 14 38/ 43/ 19 Pagan John K W 132 48 15 39/ 46/ 15 BiShot Christian Schmidt 131 2 16 34/ 38/ 28 Dr. Recover Franz 131 33 17 31/ 31/ 38 Falcon v0.3 X Ian Oversby 130 36 18 37/ 44/ 19 Memories Beppe Bezzi 129 70 19 39/ 53/ 8 HSA Copy 55440 Robert Macrae 124 31 20 33/ 43/ 24 Bob the ImpStoneer Sean McDonald 124 9 21 12/ 72/ 16 ScannerBane WFB 51 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - Standard 07/13/98 Date: 1998/07/13 Message-ID: <199807130400.AAA20483@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/13/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Standard KotH CoreWar Hill : Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 12 12:05:44 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 40/ 19/ 41 Freight Train David Moore 161 15 2 36/ 20/ 44 Guardian Ian Oversby 152 14 3 43/ 40/ 17 Foggy Swamp Beppe Bezzi 145 11 4 41/ 40/ 20 Stasis David Moore 142 122 5 38/ 35/ 27 Leapfrog David Moore 142 43 6 41/ 42/ 17 Blur '88 Anton Marsden 141 52 7 42/ 43/ 16 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 141 340 8 39/ 38/ 24 Tangle Trap David Moore 140 88 9 40/ 40/ 21 Beholder's Eye V1.7 W. Mintardjo 140 290 10 38/ 37/ 25 Kitchen Sink Robert Macrae 139 13 11 38/ 37/ 25 PacMan David Moore 138 44 12 27/ 17/ 56 EV Paper John K Wilkinson 138 28 13 24/ 9/ 67 Trident^2 '88 John K W 138 38 14 29/ 21/ 49 Evoltmp 88 John K W 138 65 15 28/ 19/ 52 Test I Ian Oversby 137 71 16 41/ 45/ 14 Blurstone '88 M. J. Pihlaja 137 9 17 29/ 24/ 47 Simple '88 Ian Oversby 135 101 18 38/ 42/ 19 Gisela 8623 Andrzej Maciejczak 134 8 19 29/ 25/ 46 CAPS KEY IS STUCK AGAIN Steven Morrell 134 212 20 20/ 34/ 46 Flame lance P._V._K. 107 1 21 10/ 87/ 4 invasion of the pod peopl Guardian 33 0 From: guenzel.p1@usa.net (Bjoern Guenzel) Subject: Re: vampire Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: <35ab83f0.2799225@news.lrz-muenchen.de>#1/1 On Mon, 13 Jul 1998 21:16:08 GMT, cgbean@alaska.net wrote: >Sorry to bother everyone AGAIN....this time I'm wondering about >vampires. Now, please forgive any foolish words below, I am but a >newbie... >Are there any major reasons for vampires becoming less effective inn the >'94 standard besides a-indirect bombing? >Did vampires become just to big? Would it help a vampire to use JMP >@0,trap? >Is that what is already used? >A-indirect bombing would hit just that instruction, right? >And is it MyVamp which does well in '94? >Why? >Thanks for any info you could provide! > >Ps-On another subject altogether, does anyone have any plans for making >a optimization proggy just for papers? Does one already exist? Would >have some tricky math stuff, but seems feasible... > > -WFB I made some experiments with a genetic constant optimizer (== genetic algorithm that operates only on the constants of warriors, rather than the whole code :-) which seems to be prospective - indeed, optimizing against certain sets of opponents works fine, the problem is that the resulting solutions are not necessarily the best against other opponents. But there is still a lot left to try. I planned to publish the thing for weeks now, I merely wanted to add a more convenient user interface, but I can't seem to get round to it :-( Anyway, it is fairly easy to code - my version is written in Scheme, so people might have to write their own version, anyway, if they are interested in using it. The algorithm is simple: each generation, take the best 25% of the population, then randomly pick pairs from this set of parents and create a child by crossover and mutation, untill the size of the population is reached agqain. Fitness-function was just something like fight each warrior from a given set 10-20 times. So far, I have usually used population size 200, where the algorithm converges in about 30 generations. Who knows, maybe I can finish it this weekend... I was hoping that some people would join the testing and searching for a better set-up :-) At this point many thanks to Robert Macrae for lots of helpful suggestions. Bjoern From: shrnpinter@aol.com (ShrnPinter) Subject: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: <1998071415150100.LAA18387@ladder01.news.aol.com>#1/1 I found out about CoreWar about a month ago. I was researching viruses to write an educational message about hoaxes to my friends (I had recieved one too many hoax alerts). I have programmed in the past, but only with high-level languages (all of them that I had FREE access to), for example, Qbasic, ObjectPAL (paradox), JavaScript(just a VERY little bit) and and a few other obscure scripting languages (winscript ect.). I came accross it and It looked interesting, so I bookmarked it and later came back to it. My first program (snowflake) was 6 points short of the beginner hill (Is that bad for a first every asm. program???) While I was writing this program, I wanted to split to a 'gate' (which I found out doesn't do anything anyway) but I bungled it and ended up splitting to the main part of the program (a 'DAT'). This caused more and more copies of the 'DAT' to be run, and I found that it did much better with the split routine in it then without, especially against 'imp spirals' and other 'DAT's. Going through the debug mode (amazingly hard to understand) I found that when it got hit with a bomb from a typical DAT (a DAT 0, 0 bomb?) the split would keep it going and cause a tie. I don't know why, but it always tied the spiral (I should explain that I had about 7 test programs including a spiral). The spiral just crawled along the graph (that graph is really cool to watch) untill it hit my program, then something wierd happened that I didn't understand. My question is, has this split thing that I stumbled onto come into common usage, and why does it survive spiral when nothing else does??? Also, I saw an internet site labled "CoreWar for dummies" is this a book you can buy (Like windows for dummies)? Thanks for all your help Joshua From: Christian Schmidt Subject: Re: suggestions Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: #1/1 Use three less processes to start your paper. That would be similar to Sad. I think this would score slightly better, maybe 1-2 pts. Another possibility is to fit a q^2-scanner. This will give you also lots of extra points. regards Christian On Mon, 13 Jul 1998 cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > Woohoo! I got 100 on the -94nop hill! With More Snotty CSnots! Dang, > I've posted a lot of messages...one would think I have nothing better to > do...=). Anyhow, I was wondering if I could get some suggestions for > improving my silk. I guess that I'd do much better if I had something > to help me defeat those dang stone/imps, and kill off more imps in > particular (every battle against the Fugitive was a tie, with the > exception of 1-and he won...). I've been looking through old warriors > and Core Warrior back-issues, but I have no idea where to start. Pretty > much, it uses TimeScape's engine (no coincedence that my first > semi-decent warrior uses someone elses engine...), as presented in Core > Warrior 3 by Beppe Bezzi, with the exception that I added one more > little copying module. That scored 99. Then I read about CCPaper (sp? > name?), and decided to add a coreclear to it. It scores slightly better > against warriors like Sphere, Torcht18 (sp?), Alien, and Iron Gate. In > fact, it beat all those warriors...maybe with some help, I could get > those 20 points needed...TIA! > -WFB > From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Comments? Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: <19980714004441.8584.rocketmail@send1a.yahoomail.com>#1/1 I have a warrior on the -b hill (around the _2_ fook) and i can't see anything to improve it. Actually, it's based on my Arsonic serie of incendiary bombers. The idea is to bomb with incendiary, but not to separate them. So, to take advantage of tornado engine, launch also two jumps to the real bomb. Well, well, well. Could someone help me improve it? ;redcode ;name 2-p d 2 ;assert 1 inc dat.f (2376*3),(2376*3)+1 start add.f inc, st mov.i jb, *st mov.i mb, @st mov.i sb, -1 sb spl #2376, 2 jb jmp 2376, 0 dat.f 0,0 clear spl #-1, 6 mov.i *bp, >jb djn.f -1, <-20 db dat.f -4, 6 bp dat.f -4, 0 end start TIA!! == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Gate crashing imps Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: <6oec9l$t11$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 Paul-V Khuong (paul_virak_khuong@yahoo.com) wrote: : How do you launch the imps? : Is it possible to do something like: : 2668 imps : ...(4 lines) : 2667 imps : ...(4 lines) : 2668 imps : ...(4 lines) : This would survive increment or decrement gates... Heh heh... that is really cool. It is indeed a nice way to break gates like JMP 0, < -10 or JMP 0, > -10 It does have some practical problems though. Most gates written in 94 code also do some sort of core-clearing. The imp can put its code after the gate but that code gets bombed immediately, which leaves nothing for the trailing imp. You're probably better off to change the 2668 imps into several 2667 ones (and then distribute them evenly throughout the core). Or make a bigger size imp. From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: vampire Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: <6oeabp$n0q$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 Oops, I left a macro out of that last post. Here's what you need: f4= @fill 100,7999~dat #0, 0~@ca r=0~!!~@sk 1000~m count4~@ca r=r+1~if r<10~! w2s?=&se dat.f #0, $0 count4=@l 0~m w2s?~@ca x=.,c=0~@ca y=.~@ca z=0~m _c4b _c4b=!!~m w2s?~m _c4d~if w==1~@ca z=z+1~m _c4c~@ca y=.~if .!=x~!~ca c _c4c=if w!=1 && z>l~@ca c=c+z-l~if w!=1~@ca z=0 _c4d=@ca w=.-y~if w<0~@ca w=w+8000 From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: vampire Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: <6oe9a0$kt3$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu> cgbean@alaska.net wrote: : Are there any major reasons for vampires becoming less effective inn the : '94 standard besides a-indirect bombing? When a scanner spl-bombs a silk, every descendent of that silk will also have the spl bomb. Jmp bombs don't have that property since they point to the wrong address when they are copied elsewhere. Also... a jmp bomb doesn't work until the paper program reaches the trap. This is unlike scanners which often bomb the entire paper when they find it. That is why vampires take longer to inflict real damage on a paper. Therefore a silk will spawn more generations against a vampire than it would against a carpet-bombing scanner. : Would it help a vampire to use JMP @0,trap? Most replicators have two lines like this: SPL @0, 1234 MOV }-1, >-1 If your bomb hits the SPL, then the paper has a natural antivamp. : And is it MyVamp which does well in '94? Why? myVamp can beat papers because it converts quickly into a spl/dat clear. The jmp-bombing phase is used to fight other programs like scanners, but it doesn't work so well against papers (which is why that phase is so short). : Ps-On another subject altogether, does anyone have any plans for making : a optimization proggy just for papers? Does one already exist? Would : have some tricky math stuff, but seems feasible... : -WFB Below are some of the pmars macros that I used to help optimize The Fugitive. Add these to your pmars.mac file. Then run it like this: pmars -b -e mypaper.red You have to set the variable l to something (12 for example): ca l=12 then hit the F4 key and watch as pmars runs the paper. pmars reports the exact number of locations in which a program of length 12 could be without being bombed. Divide that number by 7900 and you get the probability of bombing a length 12 opponent before that time step. (assuming that enemy doesn't fight back :-) The numbers will be slightly inaccurate because papers often carry part of the core with them. The actually number of hiding places will be slightly lower. Also, I've included a C program which I used for several papers. I show the Blizzard optimizer because that one has the best comments. The program randomly generates constants and then simulates them. It counts the number of hiding places and reports combinations that appear to be low. It's more accurate than pmars macros for several reasons. You can use it if you can program your paper in C code. At first, you should watch what constants you get out of it, and then make the appropriate adjustments. After you get some more confidence, you can leave it run for a while and then come back to look at your really wild results. Hopefully some good papers will be waiting for your return :) Other improvements which I would like to add: . how many extra locations are bombed when the paper is cleared by dat <2667, <5334 bombs? . the proximity of papers as seen by a Blur scanner DISCLAIMER: The following code is not guaranteed to work. Use at your own risk! First, the macros: f4= @fill 100,7999~dat #0, 0~@ca r=0~!!~@sk 1000~m count4~@ca r=r+1~if r<10~! count4=@l 0~m w2s?~@ca x=.,c=0~@ca y=.~@ca z=0~m _c4b _c4b=!!~m w2s?~m _c4d~if w==1~@ca z=z+1~m _c4c~@ca y=.~if .!=x~!~ca c _c4c=if w!=1 && z>l~@ca c=c+z-l~if w!=1~@ca z=0 _c4d=@ca w=.-y~if w<0~@ca w=w+8000 And now the C code: #include #include #define CORESIZE 8000 #define TIME 15005 main() { int a,b,c,c1,c2,c3; int qa,qb,que[TIME],ca[CORESIZE],cb[CORESIZE],ct[CORESIZE]; int stats[12]; srand(23); while(1) { /*c1 = 3510; c2 = 2365; c3 = 3315; */ c1 = (rand()%7000)+500; c2 = (rand()%4500)+1750; c3 = (rand()%4500)+1750; /* type 0 dat $ $ (initial core) 1 dat $ $ (written by paper) 2 spl @ > 3 mov } > 4 mov { < 5 jmp @ > 6 spl $ $ */ for(a=0;a<8000;a++) { ca[a]=0; cb[a]=0; ct[a]=0; } for(a=0;a<12;a++) { stats[a]=0; } ca[0]=1; /* SPL 1,0 */ cb[0]=0; ct[0]=6; ca[1]=1; /* SPL 1,0 */ cb[1]=0; ct[1]=6; ca[2]=0; /* SPL @0, >c1 */ cb[2]=c1; ct[2]=2; ca[3]=CORESIZE-1; /* MOV }-1, >-1 */ cb[3]=CORESIZE-1; ct[3]=3; ca[4]=CORESIZE-2; /* MOV }-2, >-2 */ cb[4]=CORESIZE-2; ct[4]=3; ca[5]=0; /* SPL @0, >c2 */ cb[5]=c2; ct[5]=2; ca[6]=CORESIZE-1; /* MOV }-1, >-1 */ cb[6]=CORESIZE-1; ct[6]=3; ca[7]=CORESIZE-2; /* MOV {-2, <1 */ cb[7]=1; ct[7]=4; ca[8]=0; /* JMP @0, >c3 */ cb[8]=c3; ct[8]=5; for(qa=0, qb=1, que[0]=0; qa */ que[qb]=(que[qa]+1)%CORESIZE; if(qb */ a = (que[qa] + ca[que[qa]])%CORESIZE; a = (a + ca[a]) % CORESIZE; b = (que[qa] + cb[que[qa]])%CORESIZE; b = (b + cb[b]) % CORESIZE; ca[b]=ca[a]; cb[b]=cb[a]; ct[b]=ct[a]; if(ct[b]==0) ct[b]=1; ca[(que[qa]+ca[que[qa]])%CORESIZE] = (ca[(que[qa]+ca[que[qa]])%CORESIZE]+1)%CORESIZE; cb[(que[qa]+cb[que[qa]])%CORESIZE] = (cb[(que[qa]+cb[que[qa]])%CORESIZE]+1)%CORESIZE; que[qb]=(que[qa]+1)%CORESIZE; if(qb */ a = (que[qa] + ca[que[qa]])%CORESIZE; que[qb] = (a + cb[a]) % CORESIZE; cb[que[qa]+cb[que[qa]]] = (cb[que[qa]+cb[que[qa]]]+1)%CORESIZE; break; case 6: /* SPL $, $ */ que[qb]=(que[qa]+1)%CORESIZE; if(qb6) stats[a+1] += (c-6); if(c>11) stats[a+2] += (c-11); if(c>16) stats[a+3] += (c-16); } c=0; } else c++; } } } /* report statistics */ /* if(stats[0]<5600 && stats[1]<2550 && stats[2]<1200 && stats[3]<600 && stats[4]<3400 && stats[8]<2000 && stats[9]<100) */ if(stats[0]<6000 && stats[1]<3400 && stats[2]<1900 && stats[3]<930 && stats[4]<4180 && stats[5]<1000 && stats[6]<200 && stats[8]<2500 && stats[8]>0) { printf("%4d %4d %4d :", c1, c2, c3); for(a=0;a<12;a++) printf(" %4d", stats[a]); printf("\n"); } /* for(a=0;a#1/1 > I made some experiments with a genetic constant optimizer (== genetic > algorithm that operates only on the constants of warriors, rather than > the whole code :-) which seems to be prospective > > Who knows, maybe I can finish it this weekend... I was hoping that > some people would join the testing and searching for a better set-up Sounds great! Very interesting idea. I'd be glad to help in whatever way I can. -WFB From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <1998071415150100.LAA18387@ladder01.news.aol.com>, ShrnPinter wrote >I found out about CoreWar about a month ago. I was researching viruses to write >an educational message about hoaxes to my friends (I had recieved one too many >hoax alerts). First things first: Core War has (almost) nothing to do with (computer) viruses :-) The superficial similarity of Redcode to Intel assembly is about as far as it goes. >My first program (snowflake) was 6 points short of the beginner hill >(Is that bad for a first every asm. program???) Certainly better than my first program :-) >While I was writing this program, I wanted to split to a 'gate' (which >I found out doesn't do anything anyway) A gate certainly does do something: watch what happens when an imp spiral hits a gate. >but I bungled it and ended up splitting to the main part of the program >(a 'DAT'). [snip] >I don't know why, but it always tied the spiral [snip] >My question is, has this split thing that I stumbled onto come into >common usage, and why does it survive spiral when nothing else does??? Generally in more sophisticated forms that the one used by you, but it's certainly around. To survive being overrun by a spiral, have more processes running than the spiral: any warrior which has less processes will 'fall off' and die, whilst one with the same number or more will tie. I don't quite know how your warrior works, as you didn't post the code (this always helps if you want people to comment on it :-) ), but I'm guessing the functional part is something like: foo dat.f 0,0 for 10 dat.f 0,0 rof split spl.a foo,0 jmp.a split When 'foo' is overwritten by the spiral, the spl/jmp lines pump processes in, and build up enough processes to survive being overwritten. >Also, I saw an internet site labled "CoreWar for dummies" is this a book you >can buy (Like windows for dummies)? No (why buy it when it's free on the Web anyway!). Core War for Dummies wasn't very complete the last time I looked; for more complete tutorials, see my Web pages (URL in sig). HTH Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: "John K. Lewis" Subject: Re: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/14 Message-ID: #1/1 ShrnPinter wrote: : 0, 0 bomb?) the split would keep it going and cause a tie. I don't know why, : but it always tied the spiral (I should explain that I had about 7 test : programs including a spiral). The spiral just crawled along the graph (that : graph is really cool to watch) untill it hit my program, then something wierd : happened that I didn't understand. My question is, has this split thing that I : stumbled onto come into common usage, and why does it survive spiral when : nothing else does??? You survived because you started executing the spiral code. The SPL command gives you extra processes and this allows you to run the imp spiral code that overwrote your program. : Also, I saw an internet site labled "CoreWar for dummies" is this a book you : can buy (Like windows for dummies)? Thanks for all your help Corewar for dummies is a webpage that I've neglected. It's incomplete and is supposed to include five chapters. It currently contains one. It can still be helpful in it's current form, although there are other sites that are perhaps more useful at this time. From: Stipe Predanic Subject: pizza?? Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: #1/1 What's the stuff with pizza??? Sending verifications and digital pizzas?? Stipe ADD LINE :Croatia small country with big soccer players. France '98 From: Stipe Predanic Subject: questions,questions Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: #1/1 Hi everybody. Next week I'm going on vacation and (unfortunate) I can't get my e-mail so I have to ask some (silly) questions now: Corewarrior Q. 1. When is new CW due to arrive? 2. Now when there's No-Pspace Hill and (as I can see) it's full of activities can it be possible to put it in CW?? 3. Maybe to kick old Hall of Fame with those good old warriors from the CW. (couse it won't change and if we're interested we can easily look in some old CW) 4. Is it possible to put some kind of short review of the last 28 numbers of CW?? (something like CW 40) And put short reviews in every 10 numbers??? It'll be easier to find some things that way. some ordinary corewar Q. 1. Pizza down again?? What's with the idea of changing servers for some of the hills?? 2. Am I mistaken or begginers hill is starting to be test hill for No-pspace hill?? 3. Wilmoo is a little to "strong" to test begginers warriors. But at the same time Wilkies are starting to be piece of cake for those modern warriors. some Q. about coding 1. Is it smart to put Qscan in front of a P-spacer???? I played with it a little and it seems that simple warriors with Qscan go well, but in a pspacer it looses too much. Is it my fault or ?? 2. Is booting so necessary when U have a Qscan or even a decoy.. If your opponent lived and it's not a scanner U'll be all right. 3. Can anybody explain d-clear (to me)?? I have played with it last few days (believe me when I say days) and still I can't figure it all out how it works. And just the d-clear kicks most of the Wilmoo and Wilkies warriors. Add a qscan and U have a perfect (OK. not perfect but very good) warrior. 4. I made a little boot away code for one of my test warriors (couse all of the part's were stolen and I just wanted to see how good it'll be) which goes like this: equ start gate equ ptr-7 dest0 equ 1783 probe's qscan here kreni mov.i #1/1 >Well, i'm not sure as i haven't tested it, it's not the only way to >survive a spiral without a gate: >Here's an example: > > >jmn.f pump, (start-of-warrior)-1 > > >pump spl #0, 2 > mov.i -1,>-1 >end Sure you'd survive the spiral... but you'd have no chance of killing it. :/ Can't imagine why you wouldn't rather do: pump spl #0, <(start-of-warrior)-1 jmp -1, <(start-of-warrior)-1 From: guenzel.p1@usa.net (Bjoern Guenzel) Subject: Re: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <35ac74bd.609256@news.lrz-muenchen.de>#1/1 On 15 Jul 1998 03:02:18 GMT, shrnpinter@aol.com (ShrnPinter) wrote: >>To survive being overrun by a spiral, have more >>processes running than the spiral: any warrior which has less processes >>will 'fall off' and die, whilst one with the same number or more will >>tie. > >Why??? Hm, that's somehow difficult to explain graphical. Suppose your progrm is a jmp 0 with a spiral approaching: mov.i 0,2667;spiral has >= 3 processes ... jmp 0 ; you have 1 process dat 0,0 when the spiral overwrites your program, it looks like this: mov.i 0,2667 ... mov.i 0, 2667 ;A dat 0,0 Now you have 1 process at A, whereas the spiral has at least 3 processes (not necessesarily all at A). So in the next step, the spiral will execute one of it's other processes, whereas your process will execute the instruction after A - a dat... On the other hand, if you have more processes than the spiral (accumulated by splitting), the spiral will be finished executing all it's processes before your program, and so it will overwrite the instruction after A with a mov.i 0, 2667, which your program then can safely execute. Sorry if I can't explain it any better... > >>When 'foo' is overwritten by the spiral, the spl/jmp lines pump >>processes in, and build up enough processes to survive being >>overwritten. > >How do Processes get 'overwritten' I thought they had to execute a DAT >command... You can move any instruction around in the core. If your program gets overwritten with instructions that aren't dat's, it simply executes these instructions (whereas if executing a dat your program/process dies) Perhaps look at the following program in the debugger, the simplest form of an imp : mov.i 0,1 ;imp > >>I don't quite know how your warrior works, as you didn't post the code >>(this always helps if you want people to comment on it :-) ), but I'm >>guessing the functional part is something like: >> >>foo dat.f 0,0 >> >> for 10 >> dat.f 0,0 >> rof >> >>split spl.a foo,0 >> jmp.a split > >Nothing like that at all, infact I don't even understand how this program would >operate??? Isn't it just a ten space long string of dats??? (Is this a real >"DAT"???) I think it was supposed to be the abstraction of a program (a LOOP), it's not really a useful program. > >I called my program a 'dat', it's not really. I've since found out that it is >called a stone or a bomber. It shoots dat bombs around memory. I don't know >where I got the name 'dat' from... You can chose any name you like, it's part of Corewars diversity :-) [...] Bjoern From: Richard Rognlie Subject: C++Robots Standings -- 19980715 Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <35ACA574.4B52A939@gamerz.net>#1/1 Program Name Score W / L / T Age Author ================ ===== =========== === ===================================== 1 katty 276 92/ 8/ 0 13 cfrim@ac.tuiasi.ro (catalin ifrim) 2 tommy 255 85/ 15/ 0 37 zcewj@cnfd.pgh.wec.com (Elliot W. Jac 3 ttr3 252 84/ 16/ 0 12 traber@cosinet.de (Thomas Traber) 4 ssm4 204 68/ 32/ 0 195 enpch@bath.ac.uk (C Harrison) 5 kiilbot1 192 64/ 36/ 0 166 bob2@goplay.com (bob2) 6 chaos 189 63/ 37/ 0 163 agondare@hotmail.com (alex gondarenko 7 shooter 186 62/ 38/ 0 227 itdcjr@mail1.hants.gov.uk (Justin Row 8 mariner 180 60/ 40/ 0 258 zcpjm@cnfd.pgh.wec.com (Paul J. Melko 9 knownaim00 177 59/ 41/ 0 80 c.d.wright@solipsys.compulink.co.uk ( 10 krom 171 57/ 43/ 0 135 tdavis@gate.net (Thomas E. Davis) 11 prio.2 138 46/ 54/ 0 123 oliver@jowett.manawatu.planet.co.nz ( 12 doubleshooter 126 40/ 54/ 6 147 mario.deweerd@ibm.net (Mario De Weerd 13 fodder0 120 40/ 60/ 0 57 christopher.meehan@reuters.com (C_MEE 13 troll 120 40/ 60/ 0 46 nxcholer@bechtel.com (Cholerton, Nik) 15 raystonn 110 35/ 60/ 5 102 svincent@a.crl.com (Samuel Vincent) 16 rumbler 108 36/ 64/ 0 18 smith.paul.pn@bhp.com.au (Smith, Paul 17 fodder 96 32/ 68/ 0 58 christopher.meehan@reuters.com (C_MEE 18 blacktrack 85 28/ 71/ 1 1 pauljr@bigpond.com (Paul Robinson) 19 tracker 82 27/ 72/ 1 9 rrognlie@gamerz.net (Richard Rognlie) 20 ziggy 66 22/ 78/ 0 8 rrognlie@gamerz.net (Richard Rognlie) For more information (and an outdated FAQ) http://www.gamerz.net/c++robots/ Or send a message to c++robots@gamerz.net with a SUBJECT line of help Richard -- / \__ | Richard Rognlie / Webmaster Pro Tem Ad Nauseum \__/ \ | E-Mail: rrognlie@gamerz.net | Erols Internet / \__/ | URL: http://www.gamerz.net/rrognlie/ | an RCN company \__/ | Join the fight against SPAM! http://www.cauce.org From: "Scott J. Ellentuch" Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - 94 No Pspace 07/15/98 Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <199807150515.BAA03617@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/15/98 **REPOST TEST** -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG 94 No Pspace CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Tue Jul 14 19:25:01 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 45/ 45/ 10 Red Carpet David Moore 145 8 2 34/ 26/ 40 Baseline Plus Ken Espiritu 141 32 3 40/ 39/ 22 The Machine Anton Marsden 140 40 4 33/ 26/ 41 Fixed Ken Espiritu 140 34 5 33/ 27/ 40 Newt Ian Oversby 138 52 6 30/ 24/ 46 Gemini Dream John K Wilkinson 137 57 7 30/ 24/ 46 Freight Train v0.2 David Moore 136 15 8 31/ 26/ 43 Vain Ian Oversby 135 51 9 23/ 11/ 66 The Fugitive David Moore 135 53 10 40/ 45/ 16 Eggbeater Anton Marsden 135 41 11 32/ 29/ 39 Head or Tail Christian Schmidt 134 22 12 35/ 36/ 29 Sphere Christian Schmidt 134 1 13 28/ 25/ 47 Pulp v0.4 Ian Oversby 131 50 14 31/ 33/ 36 Alien Christian Schmidt 129 28 15 28/ 28/ 45 Faces 0.1 Csaba Biro 127 2 16 29/ 32/ 39 Shadow Christian Schmidt 127 9 17 35/ 44/ 21 Scanther Christian Schmidt 126 18 18 22/ 19/ 59 Return Of Return Of The J John K W 124 55 19 28/ 32/ 39 Torch t18 P.Kline 124 54 20 33/ 47/ 20 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 118 45 21 10/ 30/ 61 --=Zoom WFB 90 0 From: "Scott J. Ellentuch" Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - MultiWarrior 94 07/15/98 Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <199807150515.BAA03602@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/15/98 **REPOST TEST** -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Multiwarrior 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 12 18:27:33 EDT 1998 # Name Author Score Age 1 aTest 4 P. Kline 5014 4 2 CyberBunny Compudemon 5014 14 3 Failure John Metcalf 5014 9 4 U-lat v3.8 Zul Nadzri 5014 27 5 Aulder Man Ian Oversby 5014 49 6 mTest P. Kline 5014 10 7 aTest 4 P. Kline 5014 5 8 Fleas 2 Mike M. 5014 2 9 Time to send in the imps Robert Hale 4990 20 10 paper test Ken Espiritu 4990 1 11 Ultra Ken Espiritu 4978 16 From: "Scott J. Ellentuch" Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - ICWS Experimental 94 07/15/98 Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <199807150515.BAA03608@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/15/98 **REPOST TEST** -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG ICWS Experimental 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Fri Jun 19 19:00:47 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 41/ 12/ 47 Venom v0.2b Christian Schmidt 171 16 2 32/ 5/ 63 Evol Cap 4 X John Wilkinson 160 63 3 29/ 3/ 69 Evolve X v4.0 John Wilkinson 155 11 4 34/ 14/ 52 Rosebud Beppe 155 42 5 40/ 36/ 25 Dr. Gate X Franz 144 34 6 36/ 34/ 30 BigBoy Robert Macrae 139 88 7 38/ 37/ 25 13 Christian Schmidt 138 1 8 28/ 19/ 53 Purple v0.1 Christian Schmidt 138 15 9 26/ 14/ 60 Sphere v0.2 Christian Schmidt 138 5 10 41/ 47/ 12 S.E.T.I. 4-X JKW 136 64 11 37/ 40/ 23 Stepping Stone 94x Kurt Franke 133 49 12 38/ 43/ 20 Tsunami v0.1 Ian Oversby 132 41 13 33/ 33/ 34 Lithium X 8 John K Wilkinson 132 54 14 38/ 43/ 19 Pagan John K W 132 48 15 39/ 46/ 15 BiShot Christian Schmidt 131 2 16 34/ 38/ 28 Dr. Recover Franz 131 33 17 31/ 31/ 38 Falcon v0.3 X Ian Oversby 130 36 18 37/ 44/ 19 Memories Beppe Bezzi 129 70 19 39/ 53/ 8 HSA Copy 55440 Robert Macrae 124 31 20 33/ 43/ 24 Bob the ImpStoneer Sean McDonald 124 9 21 12/ 72/ 16 ScannerBane WFB 51 0 From: "Scott J. Ellentuch" Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - Standard 07/15/98 Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <199807150515.BAA03598@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/15/98 **REPOST TEST** -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Standard KotH CoreWar Hill : Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 12 12:05:44 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 40/ 19/ 41 Freight Train David Moore 161 15 2 36/ 20/ 44 Guardian Ian Oversby 152 14 3 43/ 40/ 17 Foggy Swamp Beppe Bezzi 145 11 4 41/ 40/ 20 Stasis David Moore 142 122 5 38/ 35/ 27 Leapfrog David Moore 142 43 6 41/ 42/ 17 Blur '88 Anton Marsden 141 52 7 42/ 43/ 16 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 141 340 8 39/ 38/ 24 Tangle Trap David Moore 140 88 9 40/ 40/ 21 Beholder's Eye V1.7 W. Mintardjo 140 290 10 38/ 37/ 25 Kitchen Sink Robert Macrae 139 13 11 38/ 37/ 25 PacMan David Moore 138 44 12 27/ 17/ 56 EV Paper John K Wilkinson 138 28 13 24/ 9/ 67 Trident^2 '88 John K W 138 38 14 29/ 21/ 49 Evoltmp 88 John K W 138 65 15 28/ 19/ 52 Test I Ian Oversby 137 71 16 41/ 45/ 14 Blurstone '88 M. J. Pihlaja 137 9 17 29/ 24/ 47 Simple '88 Ian Oversby 135 101 18 38/ 42/ 19 Gisela 8623 Andrzej Maciejczak 134 8 19 29/ 25/ 46 CAPS KEY IS STUCK AGAIN Steven Morrell 134 212 20 20/ 34/ 46 Flame lance P._V._K. 107 1 21 10/ 87/ 4 invasion of the pod peopl Guardian 33 0 From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: Re: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <19980715020037.7045.rocketmail@send101.yahoomail.com>#1/1 ---Philip Kendall wrote: > > In article <1998071415150100.LAA18387@ladder01.news.aol.com>, ShrnPinter > wrote > >I found out about CoreWar about a month ago. I was researching viruses to write > >an educational message about hoaxes to my friends (I had recieved one too many > >hoax alerts). ------x-----cutted---- > certainly around. To survive being overrun by a spiral, have more > processes running than the spiral: any warrior which has less processes > will 'fall off' and die, whilst one with the same number or more will > tie. Well, i'm not sure as i haven't tested it, it's not the only way to survive a spiral without a gate: Here's an example: jmn.f pump, (start-of-warrior)-1 pump spl #0, 2 mov.i -1,>-1 end the pump can be anything good at stunning.I've tryied this in one of my last incendiary bombers... and it seemed to work! Anyway, i'd like to know of this works as i'm still considering me as a beginner... > HTH > > Phil > > -- > / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ > \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / > == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: rcoleman@erinet.com Subject: Re: vampire Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <6oh441$pl7$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 In article <35ab83f0.2799225@news.lrz-muenchen.de>, guenzel.p1@usa.net wrote: > On Mon, 13 Jul 1998 21:16:08 GMT, cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > > > > >Ps-On another subject altogether, does anyone have any plans for making > >a optimization proggy just for papers? Does one already exist? Would > >have some tricky math stuff, but seems feasible... > > > > -WFB > > I made some experiments with a genetic constant optimizer (== genetic > algorithm that operates only on the constants of warriors, rather than > the whole code :-) which seems to be prospective - indeed, optimizing > against certain sets of opponents works fine, the problem is that the > resulting solutions are not necessarily the best against other > opponents. But there is still a lot left to try. IIRC from some research I read, this is the norm. In particular, I remember one genetic optimized program (not corewars) 'outdoing' at least a dozen human optimized programs against the test set. When they were tested against a different set of protocols, the genetic-optimized did no better nor worse than the human written programs. I remember even more vaguely that using genetic optimization actually increased the retention of the programs. Ones that were first tuned against a particular set, then a second, still performed good, but not as well against the first set. Again, this wasn't done with corewars, and don't quote me on any of this, it's hazy, but I'm pretty sure it sounds correct. > > The algorithm is simple: each generation, take the best 25% of the > population, then randomly pick pairs from this set of parents and > create a child by crossover and mutation, untill the size of the > population is reached agqain. Fitness-function was just something like > fight each warrior from a given set 10-20 times. So far, I have > usually used population size 200, where the algorithm converges in > about 30 generations. > It sounds pretty cool to me. One thing I can suggest for future work, make all the variables like pop. size and crossover and mutation rates easy to change so others can plug in different values. It was very helpful in Jason Boer's code, which I used. Ryan Coleman -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum From: shrnpinter@aol.com (ShrnPinter) Subject: Re: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/15 Message-ID: <1998071503021900.XAA20201@ladder01.news.aol.com>#1/1 Hi, I wrote the original message earlier! Your message was helpfull, but not exactly what I was looking for, I have done alot of reading on corewar, so now I feel that I can at least communicate my questions correctly!!! >A gate certainly does do something: watch what happens when an imp >spiral hits a gate. I meant that my gate didn't do anything. I read two tutorials before writing this. One had information on the '88 standard, I had heard about the '94 standard but didn't know anything about it. The other had information and examples of imps, gates, and imp spirals. I copied my gate directly from the tutorial, and made no changes. I still don't understand gates, mainly because I don't understand the pre-decrement prefix yet... I don't understand spirals either. >To survive being overrun by a spiral, have more >processes running than the spiral: any warrior which has less processes >will 'fall off' and die, whilst one with the same number or more will >tie. Why??? >When 'foo' is overwritten by the spiral, the spl/jmp lines pump >processes in, and build up enough processes to survive being >overwritten. How do Processes get 'overwritten' I thought they had to execute a DAT command... >I don't quite know how your warrior works, as you didn't post the code >(this always helps if you want people to comment on it :-) ), but I'm >guessing the functional part is something like: > >foo dat.f 0,0 > > for 10 > dat.f 0,0 > rof > >split spl.a foo,0 > jmp.a split Nothing like that at all, infact I don't even understand how this program would operate??? Isn't it just a ten space long string of dats??? (Is this a real "DAT"???) I called my program a 'dat', it's not really. I've since found out that it is called a stone or a bomber. It shoots dat bombs around memory. I don't know where I got the name 'dat' from... I don't have the source from the original program, I overwrote it with Version 1.2, which is much improved. In the first one, everything used immediat addressing, because I couldn't understand the other addressing modes. I was very dejected to find that my program destroyed itself very quickly, and It took until I got the graphical version of Pmars to see why, I WAS HITTING MYSELF AFTER LOOPING AROUND THE CORE ONCE, DUUU!!! To make a long story short (too late) I found that I could set the increment number to prevent hitting myself. In the latest version, I have added a boot (I saw something about that and thought it sounded cool) , and have greatly optimized the code, I think I have given it a good speed boost, but I am not sure, it is certainly alot smaller. OK here is the code::: (I'm not sure if this works, I haven't tested it since a very small chang I just made, it should work though...) boot MOV 7, 247 MOV 7, 247 MOV 7, 247 MOV 7, 247 MOV 7, 247 JMP 242 endboot ammo DAT #0 snow SPL #snow stone ADD #15, ammo launch MOV ammo, @ammo repeat JMP stone junk JMP >89, {839 DAT #0, <894 MOV }0, #1004 ADD @83, @2184 SUB $94, >8321 JMP @29, 298 MUL }4, $7 (80 additional lines of decoy that I got from one of those stupid computer generated warriors) >>My first program (snowflake) was 6 points short of the beginner hill >>(Is that bad for a first every asm. program???) > >Certainly better than my first program :-) I wasn't boasting or anything. I fully expected my program to at least place on the BEGINNER hill. I was both suprised and crushed when it didn't! Thanks, sorry for makeing you write a tutorial ;-D Joshua From: Zer0Her0@aol.com Subject: some questions from a newbie.... Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: <7ceefa07.35ae7222@aol.com>#1/1 hey all, ok as u can tell i have some questions for you all. First off i have been lookin at this stuff for bout 2 years but finally decided to get my hands dirty and start coding. only prob is i don't understand it all. i am currently reading "the annotated draft of the proposed 1994 core war standard" i have read some other beginner material but it all seemed way to simple or way to complex nothin i could really dig in and understand. so anyway here we go... 1) where can i find "core war guidelines"(i understand this is copyrighted but if it is on the net will someone let me know the library here has only a crappy micro film of it.) "core wars" the 1986 standard, or "corewars standard of 1988"? if u know where any of these are either post them to the list or e-mail me. 2) also any good beginners guide to assembly language online? 3) finally anyone willin to help me build some warriors cause i understand the imp dwarf and several of the other "public" ones out there but don't understand what the basic groups are like paper, q^2 and all that stuff is. sorry that this is rambling. but that's me. later Zer0Her0 From: qute@fido.dk (Anders Rosendal) Subject: Re: new hill Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: #1/1 Ello there mate! Monday July 06 1998 04:22, John K. Lewis wrote to jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu: JKL> I think I have to disagree with your assessment. The benefit to JKL> quickscans in my opinion is that it normally trades wins with other JKL> quickscanners while still gaining wins against other warriors. This JKL> really wouldn't change with increased size. Oh? So if the max size was 4000(half) you can't see why a (quick)scan would be inefficient? If not, what if the HOLE core was full of garbage? Then there would be no point in scanning since you _know_ you would find something. Yes? :-) Greetings from lovely Denmark Anders Rosendal. From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: questions,questions Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: <199807161236.HAA11700@endeavor.flash.net>#1/1 >2. Is booting so necessary when U have a Qscan or even a decoy.. If your > opponent lived and it's not a scanner U'll be all right. Booting is helpful against some warriors and offers no advantage against others. Against a simple warrior like Dwarf, which you mentioned, booting only slows you down. Therefore you will lose more often. Against scanners, however, booting is almost required. From: Anton Marsden Subject: Re: questions,questions Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: #1/1 On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, Stipe Predanic wrote: > Corewarrior Q. > 1. When is new CW due to arrive? When the editors decide they have time to write one. > 2. Now when there's No-Pspace Hill and (as I can see) it's full of activities > can it be possible to put it in CW?? Yes. We will probably do this. > 3. Maybe to kick old Hall of Fame with those good old warriors from the CW. > (couse it won't change and if we're interested we can easily look in some > old CW) I guess this makes sense. > 4. Is it possible to put some kind of short review of the last 28 numbers of > CW?? (something like CW 40) And put short reviews in every 10 numbers??? > It'll be easier to find some things that way. Apparently, this has been done already. See the FAQ (Question 7) at http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~amarsden/corewars/corewar-faq.html > some ordinary corewar Q. > 1. Pizza down again?? What's with the idea of changing servers for some of the hills?? It's down... but I don't see an immediate need to switch servers... unless the problem begins to worsen. Does anyone mail the hill administrator when there's a problem? I tried this a while ago and the Hill was back up the next day. > 2. Am I mistaken or begginers hill is starting to be test hill for No-pspace hill?? This is the way it should be anyway. Beginners should learn how to write "normal" warriors of their own. > 3. Wilmoo is a little to "strong" to test begginers warriors. But at the same time > Wilkies are starting to be piece of cake for those modern warriors. Solution: design your own test suite. > some Q. about coding > 1. Is it smart to put Qscan in front of a P-spacer???? I played with it a little > and it seems that simple warriors with Qscan go well, but in a pspacer it > looses too much. Is it my fault or ?? I don't think so. You could give it a go though :-) > 2. Is booting so necessary when U have a Qscan or even a decoy.. If your > opponent lived and it's not a scanner U'll be all right. What if your opponent is a one-shot scanner? > 3. Can anybody explain d-clear (to me)?? I have played with it last few days > (believe me when I say days) and still I can't figure it all out how it works. > And just the d-clear kicks most of the Wilmoo and Wilkies warriors. Add a > qscan and U have a perfect (OK. not perfect but very good) warrior. Basically, it drops a DAT bomb at location n and decrements location n+1. > But version with booting looses more than one without booting (see Q. 2) > Why?? Did you check that you booted it correctly? > 5. What is a magic number? Usage ??? I think this may have something to do with Paul Kline's small stone (?). Anton. From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: questions,questions Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: #1/1 In article , Stipe Predanic wrote > >Corewarrior Q. >1. When is new CW due to arrive? When someone writes an issue :-) >2. Now when there's No-Pspace Hill and (as I can see) it's full of activities > can it be possible to put it in CW?? Definitely possible! I doubt it will get the full treatment that the '94 Hill gets (as that's actually quite a lot of work to produce), but it may well get the same sort of entry as the b-hill. >3. Maybe to kick old Hall of Fame with those good old warriors from the CW. > (couse it won't change and if we're interested we can easily look in some > old CW) I was wondering about this; with the anti-aging measures now in place at Pizza, I can't honestly see anything even getting close to the 403 score of Probe, yet alone 713. (Of course, I'll now go and be proved wrong...) >4. Is it possible to put some kind of short review of the last 28 numbers of > CW?? (something like CW 40) And put short reviews in every 10 numbers??? > It'll be easier to find some things that way. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/warrior.htm :-) >1. Pizza down again?? What's with the idea of changing servers for some of the >hills?? Knowing Sod's Law, if we move any hills to Stormking, Stormking will immediately start having problems... also, I like many of the features available at Pizza rather than Stormking (;test and the anti-ageing stuff) >2. Am I mistaken or begginers hill is starting to be test hill for No-pspace >hill?? Don't know... but it shouldn't really -- there's a large gap between the b-hill and the '94 Hill, so most warriors which gets anywhere near the '94 Hill happily hammers the b-hill. (Queue Beppe's anecdote about having the same warrior 1st on the '94 Hill and 5th on the b-hill...). I assume the same applies to the 94nop hill. >3. Wilmoo is a little to "strong" to test begginers warriors. But at the same >time > Wilkies are starting to be piece of cake for those modern warriors. Wilmoo??? I know about Wilbez and Wilkies, but what's Wilmoo?? >1. Is it smart to put Qscan in front of a P-spacer???? I played with it a >little > and it seems that simple warriors with Qscan go well, but in a pspacer it > looses too much. Is it my fault or ?? Possibly :-) A Q^2 -> a quick switcher (eg P^2 if you can fit it in) works well, but any complicated switchers are just fodder for qscans. >2. Is booting so necessary when U have a Qscan or even a decoy.. If your > opponent lived and it's not a scanner U'll be all right. Definitely! Firstly, the only point of having a decoy is to slow down scanners, so if you've got a decoy, you certainly want to be booting away from it. Also, consider what happens if you're fighting a scanner and your qscan misses... you're sitting there next to a whole load of instructions which say 'Kill Me!' :-) >3. Can anybody explain d-clear (to me)?? I have played with it last few days > (believe me when I say days) and still I can't figure it all out how it >works. First, understand core-clears... see CW 2. Once you've got that down, a d-clear shouldn't be too hard to understand (CW 52 explains why 5335 is used). >4. I made a little boot away code for one of my test warriors (couse all of > the part's were stolen and I just wanted to see how good it'll be) which > goes like this: > equ start >gate equ ptr-7 >dest0 equ 1783 > > probe's qscan here > >kreni mov.i jmn kreni,count > jmp dest0-2,<-100 ; dest0-2 to skip first two lines (in fact 3) >count dat dest0+1,7 ; 7 - seven lines of code after that > >here goes some kind of d-clear (it's really Paper Eater by David Boeren > (I hope he's not upset now)) > > But version with booting looses more than one without booting (see Q. 2) > Why?? Probably because you're sitting around for 15 cycles booting your code; unroll the loop to halve the boot time and provide your survival chances (especially when fighting another Q^2). HTH Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <1998071503021900.XAA20201@ladder01.news.aol.com>, ShrnPinter wrote [One thing to start with: when replying to other people's messages, it generally helps if you keep their bits of text in the same order as they were written, or it can get very confusing] >>To survive being overrun by a spiral, have more >>processes running than the spiral: any warrior which has less processes >>will 'fall off' and die, whilst one with the same number or more will >>tie. > >Why??? Watch what happens: (taking here a 3-point, 3-process imp just about to verrun a 1 process program; the process queues for the two warriors will be [0 2667 5334] (warrior 0) and [1] (warrior 1) ) [Warning: this is going to be a lot easier to follow if you set it up in cdb :-) ] 0 mov.i #2667,*0 1 jmp.a #0 First of all, warrior 0 copies the imp to location 2667, and warrior 1 does nothing. The process queues are now [2667 5334 1] and [1]. Next, warrior 0 copies the imp to location 5334, and warrior 1 does nothing. The process queues are now [5334 1 2668] and [1]. Now, warrior 0 copies the imp to location 5334+2667=1 (mod 8000), so core with warrior 1 about to execute is 0 mov.i #2667,*0 1 mov.i #2667,*0 2667 mov.i #2667,*0 5334 mov.i #2667,*0 So warrior 1 copies the imp to location 2668, and the two process queues are [1 2668 5335] and [2]. Finally, warrior 1 copies the imp to location 2668 (where is already is, but that doesn't matter), and warrior 2 executes the dat at location 2 and dies. Now consider what would happen if warrior 1 had 3 processes, each executing instruction 1. It's process queue would then be [1 1 1], when warrior 0's is [1 2668 5335]. Instructions would execute in the order 1 1 1 2668 1 5335 (note warrior 1 has now copied the imp to location 2, and the processes queues are [2 2 2] and [2 2669 5336]). Warrior 0 now safely executes the imp instruction at location 2 and survives. A similar situation applies if warrior 1 has more than 3 processes. >>When 'foo' is overwritten by the spiral, the spl/jmp lines pump >>processes in, and build up enough processes to survive being >>overwritten. > >How do Processes get 'overwritten' I thought they had to execute a DAT >command... The process isn't overwritten, but the code it is executing is, so in the case you're referring to (now below), there is no longer a loop once the jmp has been overwritten. >>I'm guessing the functional part is something like: >> >>foo dat.f 0,0 >> >> for 10 >> dat.f 0,0 >> rof >> >>split spl.a foo,0 >> jmp.a split > >Nothing like that at all, infact I don't even understand how this program would >operate??? I probably should have mentioned that execution starts at the 'split' line, not the 'foo' line. Otherwise it's very suicidal! >OK here is the code::: >(I'm not sure if this works, I haven't tested it since a very small chang I >just made, it should work though...) > >boot > MOV 7, 247 > MOV 7, 247 > MOV 7, 247 > MOV 7, 247 > MOV 7, 247 > JMP 242 >endboot >ammo DAT #0 >snow SPL #snow >stone ADD #15, ammo >launch MOV ammo, @ammo >repeat JMP stone >junk > JMP >89, {839 > DAT #0, <894 > MOV }0, #1004 > ADD @83, @2184 > SUB $94, >8321 > JMP @29, 298 > MUL }4, $7 >(80 additional lines of decoy that I got from one of those stupid computer >generated warriors) This survives imp spirals in the classic way: simply build up lots of processes in the main loop, and then when you're overwritten, you're OK. Did you realise you're booting the first link of 'junk', rather than ammo, BTW? Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: iltzu@sci.fi (Ilmari Karonen) Subject: Re: questions,questions Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: <6olank$m9v$1@tron.sci.fi>#1/1 Stipe Predanic (spredan@public.srce.hr) wrote: : 5. What is a magic number? Usage ??? I'm sure half the people on this newsgroup have already sent their answers to this, but I just can't resist.. :) A magic number is one that is, well, magic. It works, and you're not supposed to understand why. In Core War there are essentially two ways to get magic numbers. The first, a "brute force" approach, involves testing several values and picking the one that works best. A good example is an imp-killing d-clear: clear mov.i bomb, >gate djn.f clear, >gate bomb dat >5335, bomb-gate+1 There is a reason[1] why >5335 happens to be the best mode/constant combination for killing 3-point imps with a 2-line d-clear, but you don't have to know what it is. It just works. The other kind of magic number is one obtained from some nontrivial calculation which, once done, doesn't need to be repeated. If you want to understand how the code works you might need to find where the number comes from, but there's no need to touch it just for tweaking the code. The decoding table of a Q^2 scan is like that: dat 10*QS, 2*QS table: dat 4*QS, 1*QS dat 23*QS, 3*QS To change the step size, you just need to change the value of QS, not the table itself. Of course, it's not always possible to tell the two types apart. A lot of self-splitting stones have magic constants that place their own code where there are gaps in the bombing pattern. Finding such gaps can be done in two ways, either by calculating which bombs are skipped because of self-splitting, or by testing the stone and using cdb to see where the gaps are. [1] See past Core Warrior issues for further information[2]. [2] On all the examples, actually, not just the first one. -- '""Jy!z"!z"g"Wo6p!nz"'z!ai""""``-. ,-''Ilmari"Karonen"(iltzu@sci.fi)``-. ,-' yffb:\\mmm'zc!'t!\_!rfsn\ X http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/ X .Irwgl!_Kglou6u_(!rfsnGzc!'t!),,-' `-..__This_is_a_Moebius_.sig!____,,-' `-. From: guenzel.p1@usa.net (Bjoern Guenzel) Subject: Re: questions,questions Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: <35adae21.1342610@news.lrz-muenchen.de> On 15 Jul 1998 23:05:32 -0400, Stipe Predanic wrote: > >Hi everybody. >Next week I'm going on vacation and (unfortunate) I can't get my e-mail so I >have to ask some (silly) questions now: > >Corewarrior Q. >1. When is new CW due to arrive? There is no regular time, but I guess I am speaking for the editors when I say that you could speed things up by writing an article for it :-) >2. Now when there's No-Pspace Hill and (as I can see) it's full of activities > can it be possible to put it in CW?? >3. Maybe to kick old Hall of Fame with those good old warriors from the CW. > (couse it won't change and if we're interested we can easily look in some > old CW) Maybe there is a point here, on the other hand, the old hall of fame deserves some respect. Maybe it could be put up at pizza or some similiar prominent place (or at the Corewar hall of fame - I forgot to reply to the other post, so I just wanted to say that there IS interest in that page :-) >4. Is it possible to put some kind of short review of the last 28 numbers of > CW?? (something like CW 40) And put short reviews in every 10 numbers??? > It'll be easier to find some things that way. > >some ordinary corewar Q. >1. Pizza down again?? What's with the idea of changing servers for some of the hills?? >2. Am I mistaken or begginers hill is starting to be test hill for No-pspace hill?? I don't know (haven't looked at it for some time), but I would be surprised if that was the case. What makes you think so? >3. Wilmoo is a little to "strong" to test begginers warriors. But at the same time > Wilkies are starting to be piece of cake for those modern warriors. > >some Q. about coding >1. Is it smart to put Qscan in front of a P-spacer???? I played with it a little > and it seems that simple warriors with Qscan go well, but in a pspacer it > looses too much. Is it my fault or ?? I suppose the longer you execute the code at your starting position (Q-scan, p-space, boot,...), the higher the chance for another Q-scan to hit you. I think Q-scan/P-space combinations have been tried, but you should probably aim for a really quick p-logic >2. Is booting so necessary when U have a Qscan or even a decoy.. If your > opponent lived and it's not a scanner U'll be all right. Some of the effects of booting seem to be mysterious (at least to me), as usually I experienced improvements against opponents where it wasn't logical (eg bombers). In any case these days you should probably always boot because of the Q-scans and one-shots. The only exception would be if you have a small scanner and NO decoy or anything else that could attract a scanners attention. But I don't want to be dogmatic here - who knows, maybe there could be other reasons for not booting, too. >3. Can anybody explain d-clear (to me)?? I have played with it last few days > (believe me when I say days) and still I can't figure it all out how it works. > And just the d-clear kicks most of the Wilmoo and Wilkies warriors. Add a > qscan and U have a perfect (OK. not perfect but very good) warrior. I am not sure if you refer to the same d-clear as I do, so perhaps it would be helpful if you post your code together with some specific questions :-) >4. I made a little boot away code for one of my test warriors (couse all of > the part's were stolen and I just wanted to see how good it'll be) which > goes like this: > equ start >gate equ ptr-7 >dest0 equ 1783 > > probe's qscan here > >kreni mov.i jmn kreni,count > jmp dest0-2,<-100 ; dest0-2 to skip first two lines (in fact 3) >count dat dest0+1,7 ; 7 - seven lines of code after that > >here goes some kind of d-clear (it's really Paper Eater by David Boeren > (I hope he's not upset now)) > > But version with booting looses more than one without booting (see Q. 2) > Why?? Perhaps because your boot is ineffective (too slow). You probbly should boot flatly with mov instructions for warriorsize mov.i >5. What is a magic number? Usage ??? A number that does magic things :-) You'll probably discover by yourself that some numbers are magic. Often you'll need to find special numbers to achieve certain effects, eg mutating your warrior or not hitting yourself etc. But there are (probably) no generally magic numbers, it depends on the context (some numbers are better than others for bombing, though, but that is usually not called 'magic'). Another thing 'magic number' refers to is the step that kills a certain opponent with prob. 100% because it is the (kind of) reversed step. That can sometimes be exploited if a certain warrior is being copied unmodified by other players all the time, eg Q^2 or torcht18 (look at the description of RetroQ by Paul Kline). > >Tnx. > Stipe >PS. Sorry if my written english is bad. It's not my mother tongue so.... > >ADD LINE :Croatia: small country with big soccer players. France '98 > Bjoern From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: questions,questions Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: <35AD7D90.786E@alaska.net>#1/1 Stipe Predanic wrote: > > Hi everybody. > Next week I'm going on vacation and (unfortunate) I can't get my e-mail so I > have to ask some (silly) questions now: > No questions are silly...(I'm forced to say that, because, if it isn't true, I would be the court jester...) > Corewarrior Q. > 1. When is new CW due to arrive? I don't think _ANYONE_ knows... > 2. Now when there's No-Pspace Hill and (as I can see) it's full of activities > can it be possible to put it in CW?? I wouldn't know, but it seems like it might be a lot of ork and a lot of bandwith for not so much info. Then again, there is a lot of action, and it would be nice to cover a hill that isn't down half the time. > some ordinary corewar Q. > 1. Pizza down again?? What's with the idea of changing servers for some of the hills?? I guess so...about the changing of servers, it seems good to me. =). > 2. Am I mistaken or begginers hill is starting to be test hill for No-pspace hill?? I don't know, the -b hill seems to be in a coma...but I hope not. I think it would be better to leave the -b hill completely to the newbies, unless you desperetly need an ego boost. > 3. Wilmoo is a little to "strong" to test begginers warriors. But at the same time > Wilkies are starting to be piece of cake for those modern warriors. > I dunno...the difficulty doesn't really matter, as the scores will be compared to other scores from the same benchmark. Sorta like inflation... > 5. What is a magic number? Usage ??? > Umm...I think it's a value that, when used in a stone or scanner, ie. Dwarf, will bomb the core at continually smaller steps, and hit the warrior after bombing something like 1.5 of the core. I think there's more explanation and some sample numbers in one of the CW's. > > ADD LINE :Croatia: small country with big soccer players. France '98 Argh! Brasil should have won! That was a pathetic game...=) -WFB From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Hi, I'm new, Is there a CoreWar book for dummies??? Date: 1998/07/16 Message-ID: <6ojlq9$is9$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 : >it's not the only way to survive a spiral without a gate: : >Here's an example: : > : > : >jmn.f pump, (start-of-warrior)-1 : > : > : >pump spl #0, 2 : > mov.i -1,>-1 : >end My first bomber, Pacman, had a single-process core-clear which could survive and kill imps. clear mov bomb, #1/1 In article <19980714004441.8584.rocketmail@send1a.yahoomail.com>, paul_virak_khuong@yahoo.com wrote: > I have a warrior on the -b hill (around the _2_ fook) and i can't see > anything to improve it. Actually, it's based on my Arsonic serie of > incendiary bombers. The idea is to bomb with incendiary, but not to > separate them. So, to take advantage of tornado engine, launch also > two jumps to the real bomb. > > Well, well, well. Could someone help me improve it? > I can try > ;redcode > ;name 2-p d 2 > ;assert 1 > > inc dat.f (2376*3),(2376*3)+1 > > start add.f inc, st > mov.i jb, *st > mov.i mb, @st > mov.i sb, st mov.i -3, *-3+2376 > djn.b -5, #333 > jmz.f clear, start-2 > mb mov.i @0, >-1 > sb spl #2376, 2 > jb jmp 2376, 0 > dat.f 0,0 > clear spl #-1, 6 > mov.i *bp, >jb > djn.f -1, <-20 > db dat.f -4, 6 > bp dat.f -4, 0 > end start > I believe there is a bug here. You are trying to execute a clear with spl's then dats forever. It works nicely except the first time it moves the spl bomb to jb. It then uses jb as a pointer to bp, which it then overwrites bp with the spl bomb. The next time, because the pointer is now using db as a bomb, the dat is used to clear throughout the rest of the executiong. This sucks when you're fighting papers, because your incendiaries die, but sometimes a paper can copy itself away and onto your code, or bomb it. My solution to this is to change it to this: > jb jmp 2376, 7 > dat.f 0,0 > clear spl #-1, 6 > mov.i *bp, >jb > djn.f -1, <-20 > db dat.f -4, 6 > bp dat.f -4, 0 It doesn't interfere with your bombing routine, in fact it colors the core a little bit more. It also bombs first with the spl, the with dats. Secondly, starting your clear a little earlier might be useful. It gives a very few points better because most papers (and other programs) are sufficiently stunned for you to start spl bombing the core, insuring a bomb doesn't get thrown onto your code. This is a pretty neat little warrior, IMO. It loses to stones and scanners at almost the same rate it beats them. With mods, it beats paper pretty good. Perhaps if it was self-splitting it would help it's performance against stones. There, hope I didn't screw up too bad. Anyone care to comment on my comments? Ryan Coleman -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: some questions from a newbie.... Date: 1998/07/17 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <7ceefa07.35ae7222@aol.com>, Zer0Her0@aol.com wrote >hey all, >ok as u can tell i have some questions for you all. First off i have been >lookin at this stuff for bout 2 years but finally decided to get my hands >dirty and start coding. only prob is i don't understand it all. i am >currently reading "the annotated draft of the proposed 1994 core war standard" To be honest, it's a bit like reading the HTML DTD; fascinating reading, but doesn't actually help you understand the subject at all :-) >1) where can i find "core war guidelines"(i understand this is copyrighted but >if it is on the net will someone let me know the library here has only a >crappy micro film of it.) "core wars" the 1986 standard, or "corewars >standard of 1988"? if u know where any of these are either post them to the >list or e-mail me. The '88 standard is available on-line, either from the Core War ftp site (ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/corewar/), or from one of the mirrors (see my pages for details -- URL in sig). >2) also any good beginners guide to assembly language online? Yes. However, what you probably want is a guide to Redcode, which, despite superficial similarities, isn't actually that similar to assembly :-) Check out Ilmari Karonen's 'Beginnner's Guide to Redcode' (where should the apostrophe go in that??): http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/corewar/guide.html >3) finally anyone willin to help me build some warriors cause i understand the >imp dwarf and several of the other "public" ones out there but don't >understand what the basic groups are like paper, q^2 and all that stuff is. Read the first ten-odd issues of Core Warrior (available from Planar's site: http://para.inria.fr/~doligez/corewar/) for a good introduction to the basic warrior types. HTH Phil PS: I've been in the pub for the past few hours, so I apologise in advance for any typos, etc... -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: phil@pknight.demon.co.uk (Phil Knight) Subject: pmars graphics under winNT/95 Date: 1998/07/17 Message-ID: <900680403.12855.0.nnrp-08.9e987dc5@news.demon.co.uk>#1/1 phil@pknight.demon.co.uk (Phil Knight) wrote: >guenzel.p1@usa.net (Bjoern Guenzel) wrote: >>Whereas I have to say that I couldn't get that version to run under NT >>(can't remember if I tried Win 95)... But since for others it seems to >>work, it's probably just one of those mysterious problems... >Me neither, but I've spent most of today installing djgpp on my >machine and recompiling the pmars source. I've now got a working >graphics version under NT... but the debugger is soooooo incredibly >slow at responding to keyboard input, i.e. press a key and more often >than not it isn't picked up at all. I've now fixed this (FWIW the mouse event was intercepting the key presses and not forwarding them to the debugger). For anyone having trouble getting an NT/95 version to run, it might be worth trying: http://www.pknight.demon.co.uk/corewar/pmarsv.zip As well as an executable, the zip contains a font file which needs to reside either in the directory from where the program is run or the directory specified by the GRXFONT environment variable. I'd be interested to hear if this works for anyone else. -- Phil Knight From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: some questions from a newbie.... Date: 1998/07/17 Message-ID: <35AEBAE6.482A@alaska.net>#1/1 Zer0Her0@aol.com wrote: > > hey all, > ok as u can tell i have some questions for you all. First off i have been > lookin at this stuff for bout 2 years but finally decided to get my hands > dirty and start coding. only prob is i don't understand it all. i am > currently reading "the annotated draft of the proposed 1994 core war standard" > i have read some other beginner material but it all seemed way to simple or > way to complex nothin i could really dig in and understand. so anyway here we > go... Have you read Ilmari Karonen (sp?) Guide for Beginner's? That is a very good start. > 1) where can i find "core war guidelines"(i understand this is copyrighted but > if it is on the net will someone let me know the library here has only a > crappy micro film of it.) Well, a bit back, someone e-mailed A.K. Dewdney about posting the articles, and supposedly now has permission. I remember seeing the Core War guidelines on one of the sites, but don't remember which one. "core wars" the 1986 standard, or "corewars > standard of 1988"? if u know where any of these are either post them to the > list or e-mail me. > 2) also any good beginners guide to assembly language online? Probably not for assembly. It's just too complicated. That's what college is for. =). Though, you should keep in mind that RedCode is very different, and easier to learn than other asm variants. > 3) finally anyone willin to help me build some warriors cause i understand the > imp dwarf and several of the other "public" ones out there but don't > understand what the basic groups are like paper, q^2 and all that stuff is. I'd be glad to help. Just send me e-mail with any questions. Also, posting your work on this newsgroup is usually enough. Don't get too confused about some of the terms stated here. A lot of the messages contain much technical terms, which will probably be over your head. > sorry that this is rambling. but that's me. later N/P. > Zer0Her0 -WFB From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Pizza Date: 1998/07/17 Message-ID: <35AEA524.5485@alaska.net>#1/1 Has anyone informed Pizza's maintainer about the problem? I've asssumed that someone has, but now I'm not so sure...I'll e-mail him, is his addy still sd@...? -WFB From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: activity Date: 1998/07/18 Message-ID: <19980718035307.19243.rocketmail@send101.yahoomail.com>#1/1 Is it me or corewar is far mopre active at night than earlier? Again, anyone wanna play a tournament('thinking that the last one wasn't at the good time: i'd had do it if it was some weeks later... School!; can't play!) == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: iltzu@sci.fi (Ilmari Karonen) Subject: Re: some questions from a newbie.... Date: 1998/07/18 Message-ID: <6or86r$6rn$1@tron.sci.fi>#1/1 Philip Kendall (pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) wrote: : >currently reading "the annotated draft of the proposed 1994 core war standard" : To be honest, it's a bit like reading the HTML DTD; fascinating reading, : but doesn't actually help you understand the subject at all :-) I'd personally disagree with that, but I guess it has a lot to do with the way different people best absord information. Maybe that analogy of yours already said it all; I've learnt a lot about HTML from the DTDs. All I can say is that compared to some of the mind-bending definitions in the '94 draft, the DTD is a piece of cake. ;) : assembly :-) Check out Ilmari Karonen's 'Beginnner's Guide to Redcode' : (where should the apostrophe go in that??): : http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/corewar/guide.html *sigh* Either way, I guess, as I haven't been consistent about it myself. I think I'll do a search-and-replace some day to make the official form "Beginners' guide to Redcode". Or something like that. : >3) finally anyone willin to help me build some warriors cause i understand the : >imp dwarf and several of the other "public" ones out there but don't : >understand what the basic groups are like paper, q^2 and all that stuff is. Ever since writing the abovementioned guide I've been thinking of doing "Part 2: Beginners' guide to Core War" which would contain just that. I might get around to it some day, but I have no idea if I'll get it ready within this millennium.. -- Ilmari Karonen (iltzu@sci.fi) http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/ From: John.Metcalf@p18.f94.chaos.camelot.co.uk (John Metcalf) Subject: Help, how do I remove a warrior Date: 1998/07/18 Message-ID: #1/1 Help, How do I delete a warrior from Stormking's KoTH? A little test I send did better than I though, and now I want to get rid of it. Thanks, John From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Re: activity Date: 1998/07/19 Message-ID: <35B14D6A.53D9@alaska.net>#1/1 Paul-V Khuong wrote: > > Is it me or corewar is far mopre active at night than earlier? > Well, you know us nerds... > Again, anyone wanna play a tournament('thinking that the last one > wasn't at the good time: i'd had do it if it was some weeks later... > School!; can't play!) > Yeah! Sounds good. -WFB From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - 94 No Pspace 07/20/98 Date: 1998/07/20 Message-ID: <199807200400.AAA12593@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/20/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG 94 No Pspace CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Fri Jul 17 13:53:20 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 43/ 37/ 20 scan test 1 Anonymous 149 1 2 40/ 40/ 20 The Machine Anton Marsden 140 44 3 43/ 47/ 10 Red Carpet David Moore 139 12 4 34/ 29/ 38 Baseline Plus Ken Espiritu 139 36 5 34/ 30/ 37 Fixed Ken Espiritu 138 38 6 33/ 30/ 38 Newt Ian Oversby 136 56 7 31/ 25/ 44 Pulp v0.4 Ian Oversby 136 54 8 32/ 28/ 40 Vain Ian Oversby 135 55 9 35/ 36/ 28 Sphere Christian Schmidt 135 5 10 30/ 26/ 44 Freight Train v0.2 David Moore 134 19 11 23/ 13/ 64 The Fugitive David Moore 134 57 12 36/ 40/ 24 Floody River P.Kline 133 4 13 29/ 27/ 44 Gemini Dream John K Wilkinson 131 61 14 33/ 36/ 32 Alien Christian Schmidt 130 32 15 31/ 33/ 36 Shadow Christian Schmidt 130 13 16 31/ 33/ 36 Head or Tail Christian Schmidt 130 26 17 40/ 50/ 10 HeScans P.Kline 129 3 18 29/ 30/ 41 Faces 0.1 Csaba Biro 127 6 19 37/ 48/ 15 Eggbeater Anton Marsden 126 45 20 30/ 36/ 34 fTest P.Kline 124 2 21 21/ 20/ 59 Return Of Return Of The J John K W 121 59 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - MultiWarrior 94 07/20/98 Date: 1998/07/20 Message-ID: <199807200400.AAA12580@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/20/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Multiwarrior 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Thu Jul 16 16:44:55 EDT 1998 # Name Author Score Age 1 aTest 4 P. Kline 5030 4 2 Failure John Metcalf 5030 9 3 Aulder Man Ian Oversby 5030 49 4 mTest P. Kline 5030 10 5 CyberBunny Compudemon 5018 14 6 U-lat v3.8 Zul Nadzri 5018 27 7 Fleas 2 Mike M. 5018 2 8 Time to send in the imps Robert Hale 5018 20 9 paper test Ken Espiritu 4994 1 10 aTest 4 P. Kline 4982 5 11 Quicker Pulp Mike M. 4982 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - ICWS Experimental 94 07/20/98 Date: 1998/07/20 Message-ID: <199807200400.AAA12584@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/20/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG ICWS Experimental 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Fri Jun 19 19:00:47 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 41/ 12/ 47 Venom v0.2b Christian Schmidt 171 16 2 32/ 5/ 63 Evol Cap 4 X John Wilkinson 160 63 3 29/ 3/ 69 Evolve X v4.0 John Wilkinson 155 11 4 34/ 14/ 52 Rosebud Beppe 155 42 5 40/ 36/ 25 Dr. Gate X Franz 144 34 6 36/ 34/ 30 BigBoy Robert Macrae 139 88 7 38/ 37/ 25 13 Christian Schmidt 138 1 8 28/ 19/ 53 Purple v0.1 Christian Schmidt 138 15 9 26/ 14/ 60 Sphere v0.2 Christian Schmidt 138 5 10 41/ 47/ 12 S.E.T.I. 4-X JKW 136 64 11 37/ 40/ 23 Stepping Stone 94x Kurt Franke 133 49 12 38/ 43/ 20 Tsunami v0.1 Ian Oversby 132 41 13 33/ 33/ 34 Lithium X 8 John K Wilkinson 132 54 14 38/ 43/ 19 Pagan John K W 132 48 15 39/ 46/ 15 BiShot Christian Schmidt 131 2 16 34/ 38/ 28 Dr. Recover Franz 131 33 17 31/ 31/ 38 Falcon v0.3 X Ian Oversby 130 36 18 37/ 44/ 19 Memories Beppe Bezzi 129 70 19 39/ 53/ 8 HSA Copy 55440 Robert Macrae 124 31 20 33/ 43/ 24 Bob the ImpStoneer Sean McDonald 124 9 21 12/ 72/ 16 ScannerBane WFB 51 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - Standard 07/20/98 Date: 1998/07/20 Message-ID: <199807200400.AAA12576@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/20/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Standard KotH CoreWar Hill : Last battle concluded at : Sat Jul 18 14:48:47 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 40/ 19/ 41 Freight Train David Moore 161 15 2 36/ 20/ 44 Guardian Ian Oversby 152 14 3 44/ 40/ 17 Foggy Swamp Beppe Bezzi 148 11 4 42/ 41/ 17 Blur '88 Anton Marsden 144 52 5 41/ 39/ 20 Stasis David Moore 144 122 6 39/ 34/ 27 Leapfrog David Moore 144 43 7 40/ 39/ 20 Beholder's Eye V1.7 W. Mintardjo 142 290 8 42/ 42/ 16 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 142 340 9 39/ 37/ 24 Tangle Trap David Moore 141 88 10 39/ 37/ 25 Kitchen Sink Robert Macrae 141 13 11 39/ 37/ 24 PacMan David Moore 141 44 12 42/ 45/ 13 Blurstone '88 M. J. Pihlaja 139 9 13 24/ 9/ 67 Trident^2 '88 John K W 138 38 14 27/ 17/ 56 EV Paper John K Wilkinson 138 28 15 29/ 21/ 49 Evoltmp 88 John K W 138 65 16 28/ 19/ 52 Test I Ian Oversby 137 71 17 39/ 42/ 19 Gisela 8623 Andrzej Maciejczak 137 8 18 29/ 24/ 47 Simple '88 Ian Oversby 135 101 19 29/ 25/ 46 CAPS KEY IS STUCK AGAIN Steven Morrell 134 212 20 22/ 33/ 44 Flame lance P._V._K. 112 1 21 0/ 94/ 6 : microgate : Joel Bushart 6 0 From: Mark Howson Subject: Amiga pmars Date: 1998/07/22 Message-ID: <35B61564.38D6@nottingham.ac.uk>#1/1 Hi, Sorry to everyone on the group who isn't an Amiga owner, as this probably isn't that interesting to you :( I'm working on a 2nd version of the Amiga pMARS 0.8. One person has given me suggestions for this (which have been implemented), and some others have mentioned they have ideas but haven't actually told me what they are :) So if anyone has anything they'd like to see in pMARS on the Amiga that isn't there now, /please/ mail me. Thanks ;) So far, I've: fixed a few bugs. Hopefully better keyboard handling. PPC version (10x times faster :) Amiga version of 'koth'. Menus. Option to change colours. etc. Mark From: Paul-V Khuong Subject: pizza Date: 1998/07/23 Message-ID: <19980723004239.5384.rocketmail@send1d.yahoomail.com>#1/1 there's something wrong with pizza web page: >Your program Arsonic B fights 200 times: >Arsonic B wins: 126 >OXY-10 wins: 35 >Ties: 39 > >Your overall score: 141.540000 (Placing 4th) Yet, on pizza home page, Arsonic's still 7th ????? == Vive le Qu�bec libre... d� souverainistes!!! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From: M Joonas Pihlaja Subject: Re: Yes, I see...Sorta... Date: 1998/07/23 Message-ID: #1/1 On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, Haarg2 wrote: > What I don't understand though is the various theories and stuff. > I have heard paper, scissors, stone alot and I can probably hazard a guess > but would any one be so kind as to tell me? > paper: A program that makes lots of copies of itself into the core. stone: A program that MOVes bombs (usually dats) into core hoping to overwrite some instruction of the opponent. scissors: A program that scans the core looking for an opponent. Once something was found, it usually slows down the opponent by moving spl 0 instructions on top of it. Then it later goes back and kills the slowed down opponent. > Basically what do I need to do after reading the guides on actually coding > the warrior and understanding roughly how it works? 1) Get some warriors. A good place to start is www.koth.org and follow the "Links" link and then the "WilMoo" link. Also, Planar's warrior archive is at: http://para.inria.fr/~doligez/ ...follow the "Core War" link. 2) Learn to use the pmars debugger (and get a visual mars). It is a great help to be able to step through the code, set break points, and see what happens to the code while it is running, etc. Also, try and work out some of your ideas into redcode. If it has been done before, then study all those warriors very carefully. Joonas Pihlaja From: "Haarg2" Subject: Yes, I see...Sorta... Date: 1998/07/23 Message-ID: <6p83kp$700$1@heliodor.xara.net>#1/1 OKay thanks for pointing me to the right places for learning redcode and stuff...I'm sort of getting it now Yeah... What I don't understand though is the various theories and stuff. I have heard paper, scissors, stone alot and I can probably hazard a guess but would any one be so kind as to tell me? Basically what do I need to do after reading the guides on actually coding the warrior and understanding roughly how it works? From: M Joonas Pihlaja Subject: Re: Help a Newbie? (Booting and Decoys) Date: 1998/07/23 Message-ID: #1/1 On Thu, 23 Jul 1998 12:23:46 +0100 Mark Howard wrote: @A> Could anyone give me some tips on the details of booting and decoys? > What are the best ways of doing it? > How effective can this be against scanners? > What are the advantages/disadvantages. Here's my take on it. For decoys the answer is pretty straight forward. If you want a continuous decoy in core then the best way to do it is a series of movs that decrements two locations and copies a something visible (previously decremented). i.e. something like: D equ -100 ; decoy distance rel. to dc dc mov {dc+D , Subject: Olympic report 1998-07-23 Date: 1998/07/23 Message-ID: <6p7q7b$ep0@news-rocq.inria.fr>#1/1 These are the warriors from round 8 of the Redcode Maniacs Tournament. The rules of this round were: fight against a hill of 10 given warriors. >>> 244 *p-U v.4 28/ 16/ 56 131 141.33 >>> 17 *The Paperboy and his silver bu 58/ 13/ 29 1025 202.72 >>> 137 *Al's Cave 48/ 37/ 14 85 158.84 >>> 668 *Almost the Last One 35/ 56/ 9 145 113.99 >>> 138 *Mind Writer 48/ 38/ 13 94 158.62 >>> 19 *Reindeer 62/ 21/ 17 1029 202.05 >>> 154 *Small Graft 40/ 25/ 35 87 155.22 >>> 180 *Invisigoth 44/ 40/ 16 134 148.56 -- Planar Remove ".gov" from my address. From: "Mark Howard" Subject: Help a Newbie? (Booting and Decoys) Date: 1998/07/23 Message-ID: <6p76es$9hk$1@flex.london.pipex.net>#1/1 Could anyone give me some tips on the details of booting and decoys? What are the best ways of doing it? How effective can this be against scanners? What are the advantages/disadvantages. Many thanks in advance Mark Howard From: M Joonas Pihlaja Subject: Help with "The Math of Corewar Stepsizes" Date: 1998/07/23 Message-ID: #1/1 I'm having trouble understanding the proof of theorem 7 in Morell's paper. You'll be safe to assume that I completely don't understand the proof. However, these are the tricky bits: We claim that [d+K,e+K) is in the partition. If d+K is unbombed, then the first observation shows us that d is the j'th bomb. Thus, the j+1'st bomb will be dropped at d+K, so d+K is in the interval [d,e). Then e-K is also in this interval, and as it is unbombed, the second observation tells us it is 0, contrary to assumption. Now the part that I don't follow is how d+K \in [d,e) implies e-K \in [d,e). Ditto with "Similarly e+K has been bombed". I also don't see how: The second observation also assures us that no bombs are between d+K and e+K. This proves the claim. I think that the Partition model could have been treated more thoroughly before jumping right into the theorem of the section. It took me a while to figure out a decent definition (of course _I'm_ having trouble with theorem 7 ;). Thanks for any help you can offer, Joonas Pihlaja From: "Stephane GUILLOT MACLER" Subject: Re: Cat�logo de videojuegos Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: <6p9udd$n4p$1@heliodor.xara.net>#1/1 Don't worry about that. It's just an automatic mail from a company in Spain trying to advert for their numerous CD-ROM titles. They sent the same message all over the net. Just good to practice your Spanish, so if you need it... More or less: "We present you the largest collection of CD-ROMs of Spain, with more than 2000 titles. We have the latest games, learning CDs, culture, graphic applications, DVD videos, Power CD, etc. Visit our web site and find whatever you need thanks to our powerful search engine." I hope my American/English is not too bad. Dana Duun Shtoni of Vesper, Lake Superior. �Want some fish steaks, traveller? Just tell me how many: 2000, 3000? What? Want some black plate leggings? Err� How do you cook that?� From: "YoBo [NME]" Subject: Re: Cat�logo de videojuegos Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: <6p9q3u$jgl$1@heliodor.xara.net>#1/1 WTF! -- ��������������������� YoBo [NME] tomwvett@globalnet.co.uk ICQ No. 6319792 Rom Ware - http://www.office2000.es wrote in message <35B86BB1.5DFB4481@office2000.es>... >http://www.office2000.es > >Le presentamos la m�s amplia colecci�n de CD ROMs de toda Espa�a, con >m�s de 2000 t�tulos. >Tenemos las �ltimas novedades en juegos, CDs educativos, culturales, >aplicaciones gr�ficas, v�deos en DVD, Power CD, ... >Vis�tenos y encuentre todo aquello que necesita gracias a nuestro >potente buscador. > > From: "Mark Howard" Subject: Re: pizza Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: <6p9jc8$c38$1@flex.london.pipex.net>#1/1 Paul-V Khuong wrote in message <19980723004239.5384.rocketmail@send1d.yahoomail.com>... >there's something wrong with pizza web page: > >>Your program Arsonic B fights 200 times: >>Arsonic B wins: 126 >>OXY-10 wins: 35 >>Ties: 39 >> >>Your overall score: 141.540000 (Placing 4th) > >Yet, on pizza home page, Arsonic's still 7th >????? > I think that was just a test, if the subject of the mail you received from pizza starts '94b/test' then those results arent stored. Still, you're up to 3rd right now anyway, nice one :) Mark Howard From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Help a Newbie? (Booting and Decoys) Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: <4duhtYAMO8t1EwDa@kendalls.demon.co.uk>#1/1 In article <6p76es$9hk$1@flex.london.pipex.net>, Mark Howard wrote >Could anyone give me some tips on the details of booting and decoys? What >are the best ways of doing it? How effective can this be against scanners? >What are the advantages/disadvantages. When writing a boot routine, there are two things you need to be concerned about (as with almost any other code, for that matter!): speed and size. The ultimate in speed is a completely unrolled loop, something like: (last is the last instruction in your warrior which you want to boot) boot mov.i last,{ptr mov.i {boot,{ptr mov.i {boot,{ptr [repeat until your entire warrior is booted] ptr spl.a @destination,#0 div.f ptr,ptr while the ultimate in size is a simple loop boot mov.i last,{ptr djn.b boot,#length ptr spl.a @destination,#0 div.f ptr,ptr Obviously, there are compromises between these two extremes. In both cases, the div.f line serves to both remove the boot pointer, to prevent it being 'bombed through' via something using a-field indirection (commonly papers), and kills off the process used to boot. If you aren't worried about this, you can changed the spl to a jmp and ignore the div line. Whether you should be worried about this depends on what you're fighting, and what you're worried about appearing on the Hill in the future... One trick which is possible, but I haven't seen used very often is that when using an unrolled loop, your warrior doesn't need to be contiguous in your initial code, which can make avoid self-scanning a lot easier. The effect of booting depends a lot on the type of scanner you're fighting: one-shots will murder many non-booting warriors, complete wipers like He Scans Alone can be made to waste a lot of time, whilst Blur-type scanners are probably less affected. The disadvantage of booting is of course that you are wasting time, especially if you're not fighting a scanner. Decoys are very much a specialised weapon these days, and aren't used that much; He Scans Alone used one to beat one-shots, but qscanners can often lock onto the decoymaker and then kill the warrior as well as the decoymaker. HTH Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: Howard Holt Subject: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: <35B99F1F.6DC6F5D6@cchono.com>#1/1 Just got back from a couple of months underway, and I missed getting a copy of the new(er :) Win '95 compatible pMARS... could somebody repeat the URL? Tanx From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: pizza Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: <199807241727.NAA17167@valhalla.stormking.com>#1/1 >I think that was just a test, if the subject of the mail you received from >pizza starts '94b/test' then those results arent stored. Yeah but unsuccessful challenges also affect the Hill's scores because the 26th warrior changes the others results, even though it's been pushed off already. -jkw From: stst@vuse.vanderbilt.edu (Stefan Strack) Subject: Core War Frequently Asked Questions (rec.games.corewar FAQ) Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: Archive-name: games/corewar-faq Last-Modified: 95/10/12 Version: 3.6 These are the Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) from the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.corewar. A plain text version of this document is posted every two weeks. The hypertext version is available as _________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents 1. What is Core War 2. Is it Core War or Core Wars? 3. Where can I find more information about Core War? 4. Core War has changed since Dewdney's articles. Where do I get a copy of the current instruction set? 5. What is ICWS'94? Which simulators support ICWS'94? 6. What is the ICWS? 7. What is TCWN? 8. How do I join? 9. What is the EBS? 10. Where are the Core War archives? 11. Where can I find a Core War system for ...? 12. I do not have FTP. How do I get all this great stuff? 13. I do not have access to Usenet. How do I post and receive news? 14. Are there any Core War related WWW sites? 15. When is the next tournament? 16. What is KotH? How do I enter? 17. Is it DAT 0, 0 or DAT #0, #0? How do I compare to core? 18. How does SLT (Skip if Less Than) work? 19. What is the difference between in-register and in-memory evaluation? 20. What does (expression or term of your choice) mean? 21. Other questions? _________________________________________________________________ What is Core War? Core War is a game played by two or more programs (and vicariously by their authors) written in an assembly language called Redcode and run in a virtual computer called MARS (for Memory Array Redcode Simulator). The object of the game is to cause all processes of the opposing program to terminate, leaving your program in sole posession of the machine. There are Core War systems available for most computer platforms. Redcode has been standardized by the ICWS, and is therefore transportable between all standard Core War systems. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Is it "Core War" or "Core Wars"? Both terms are used. Early references were to Core War. Later references seem to use Core Wars. I prefer "Core War" to refer to the game in general, "core wars" to refer to more than one specific battle. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Where can I find more information about Core War? Core War was first described in the Core War Guidelines of March, 1984 by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Western Ontario (Canada). Dewdney wrote several "Computer Recreations" articles in Scientific American which discussed Core War, starting with the May 1984 article. Those articles are contained in two anthologies: Author: Dewdney, A. K. Title: The Armchair Universe: An Exploration of Computer Worlds Published: New York: W. H. Freeman (c) 1988 ISBN: 0-7167-1939-8 Library of Congress Call Number: QA76.6 .D517 1988 Author: Dewdney, A. K. Title: The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery Published: New York: W. H. Freeman (c) 1990 ISBN: 0-7167-2125-2 (Hardcover), 0-7167-2144-9 (Paperback) Library of Congress Call Number: QA76.6 .D5173 1990 A.K. Dewdney's articles are still the most readable introduction to Core War, even though the Redcode dialect described in there is no longer current. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Core War has changed since Dewdney's articles. Where do I get a copy of the current instruction set? A draft of the official standard (ICWS'88) is available as . This document is formatted awkwardly and contains ambiguous statements. For a more approachable intro to Redcode, take a look at Mark Durham's tutorial, and . Steven Morrell (morrell@math.utah.edu) is preparing a more practically oriented Redcode tutorial that discusses different warrior classes with lots of example code. Mail him for a preliminary version. Michael Constant (mconst@csua.berkeley.edu) is reportedly working on a beginner's introduction. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is ICWS'94? Which simulators support ICWS'94? There is an ongoing discussion about future enhancements to the Redcode language. A proposed new standard, dubbed ICWS'94, is currently being evaluated. A major change is the addition of "instruction modifiers" that allow instructions to modify A-field, B-field or both. Also new is a post-increment indirect addressing mode and unrestricted opcode and addressing mode combination ("no illegal instructions"). ICWS'94 is backwards compatible; i.e. ICWS'88 warriors will run correctly on an ICWS'94 system. Take a look at the ICWS'94 draft for more information. You can try out the new standard by submitting warriors to the '94 hills of the KotH servers. Two corewar systems currently support ICWS'94, pMARS (many platforms) and Redcoder (Mac), both available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is the ICWS? About one year after Core War first appeared in Sci-Am, the "International Core War Society" (ICWS) was established. Since that time, the ICWS has been responsible for the creation and maintenance of Core War standards and the running of Core War tournaments. There have been six annual tournaments and two standards (ICWS'86 and ICWS'88). [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is TCWN? Since March of 1987, "The Core War Newsletter" (TCWN) has been the official newsletter of the ICWS. It is published quarterly and recent issues are also available as Encapsulated PostScript files. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ How do I join? For more information about joining the ICWS (which includes a subscription to TCWN), or to contribute an article, review, cartoon, letter, joke, rumor, etc. to TCWN, please contact: Jon Newman 13824 NE 87th Street Redmond, WA 98052-1959 email: jonn@microsoft.com (Note: Microsoft has NO affiliation with Core War. Jon Newman just happens to work there, and we want to keep it that way!) Current annual dues are $15.00 in US currency. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is the EBS? The Electronic Branch Section (EBS) of the ICWS is a group of Core War enthusiasts with access to electronic mail. There are no fees associated with being a member of the EBS, and members do reap some of the benefits of full ICWS membership without the expense. For instance, the ten best warriors submitted to the EBS tournament are entered into the annual ICWS tournament. All EBS business is conducted in the rec.games.corewar newsgroup. The current goal of the EBS is to be at the forefront of Core War by writing and implementing new standards and test suites. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Where are the Core War archives? Many documents such as the guidelines and the ICWS standards along with previous tournament Redcode entries and complete Core War systems are available via anonymous ftp from (128.32.149.19) in the /pub/corewar directories. Also, most of past rec.games.corewar postings (including Redcode source listings) are archived there. Jon Blow (blojo@csua.berkeley.edu) is the archive administrator. When uploading to /pub/corewar/incoming, ask Jon to move your upload to the appropriate directory and announce it on the net. Much of what is available on soda is also available on the German archive at iraun1.ira.uka.de (129.13.10.90) in the /pub/x11/corewars directory. The plain text version of this FAQ is automatically archived by news.answers. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Where can I find a Core War system for . . . ? Core War systems are available via anonymous ftp from ftp.csua.berkeley.edu in the /pub/corewar/systems directory. Currently, there are UNIX, IBM PC-compatible, Macintosh, and Amiga Core War systems available there. It is a good idea to check for program updates first. CAUTION! There are many, many Core War systems available which are NOT ICWS'88 (or even ICWS'86) compatible available at various archive sites other than ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. Generally, the older the program - the less likely it will be ICWS compatible. Reviews of Core War systems would be greatly appreciated in the newsgroup and in the newsletter. Below is a not necessarily complete or up-to-date list of what's available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu: MADgic41.lzh - corewar for the Amiga, v4.1 MAD4041.lzh - older version? MAD50B.lha - corewar for the Amiga, beta version 5.0 Redcoder-21.hqx - corewar for the Mac, supports ICWS'88 and '94 (without extensions) core-11.hqx - corewar for the Mac core-wars-simulator.hqx - same as core-11.hqx? corewar_unix_x11.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX/X-windows, ICWS'86 but not ICWS'88 compatible koth31.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX/X-windows. This program ran the former KotH server at intel.com koth.shar.Z - older version kothpc.zip - port of older version of KotH to the PC deluxe20c.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX (broken X-windows or curses) and PC mars.tar.Z - corewar for UNIX, likely not ICWS'88 compatible icons.zip - corewar icons for MS-Windows macrored.zip - a redcode macro-preprocessor (PC) c88v49.zip - PC corewar, textmode display mars88.zip - PC corewar, graphics mode display corwp302.zip - PC corewar, textmode display, slowish mercury2.zip - PC corewar written in assembly, fast! mtourn11.zip - tournament scheduler for mercury (req. 4DOS) pmars08s.zip - portable system, ICWS'88 and '94, runs on UNIX, PC, Mac, Amiga. C source archive pmars08s.tar.Z - same as above pmars08.zip - PC executables with graphics display, req 386+ macpmars02.sit.hqx - pMARS executable for Mac (port of version 0.2) buggy, no display MacpMARS1.99a.cpt.hqx - port of v0.8 for the Mac, with display and debugger MacpMARS1.0s.cpt.hqx - C source (MPW, ThinkC) for Mac frontend ApMARS03.lha - pMARS executable for Amiga (port of version 0.3.1) wincor11.zip - MS-Windows system, shareware ($15) [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ I do not have FTP. How do I get all this great stuff? There is an ftp email server at ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com. Send email with a subject and body text of "help" (without the quotes) for more information on its usage. If you don't have access to the net at all, send me a 3.5 '' diskette in a self-addressed disk mailer with postage and I will mail it back with an image of the Core War archives in PC format. My address is at the end of this post. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ I do not have access to Usenet. How do I post and receive news? To receive rec.games.corewar articles by email, join the COREWAR-L list run on the Stormking.Com list processor. To join, send the message SUB COREWAR-L FirstName LastName to listproc@stormking.com. You can send mail to corewar-l@stormking.com to post even if you are not a member of the list. Responsible for the listserver is Scott J. Ellentuch (tuc@stormking.com). Another server that allows you to post (but not receive) articles is available. Email your post to rec-games-corewar@cs.utexas.edu and it will be automatically posted for you. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Are there any Core War related WWW sites? You bet. Each of the two KotH sites sport a world-wide web server. Stormking's Core War page is ; pizza's is . A third WWW site is in Koeln, Germany: . Last but not least, Stephen Beitzel's "Unofficial Core War Page" is . All site are in varying stages of construction, so it would be futile to list here what they have to offer. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ When is the next tournament? The ICWS holds an annual tournament. Traditionally, the deadline for entering is the 15th of December. The EBS usually holds a preliminary tournament around the 15th of November and sends the top finishers on to the ICWS tournament. Informal double-elimination and other types of tournaments are held frequently among readers of the newsgroup; watch there for announcements or contact me. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is KotH? How do I enter? King Of The Hill (KotH) is an ongoing Core War tournament available to anyone with email. You enter by submitting via email a Redcode program (warrior) with special comment lines. You will receive a reply indicating how well your program did against the current top programs "on the hill". There are two styles of KotH tournaments, "classical" and "multi-warrior". The "classical" KotH is a one-on-one tournament, that is your warrior will play 100 battles against each of the 20 other programs currently on the Hill. You receive 3 points for each win and 1 point for each tie. (The existing programs do not replay each other, but their previous battles are recalled.) All scores are updated to reflect your battles and all 21 programs are ranked from high to low. If you are number 21 you are pushed off the Hill, if you are higher than 21 someone else is pushed off. In "multi-warrior" KotH, all warriors on the hill fight each other at the same time. Score calculation is a bit more complex than for the one-on-one tournament. Briefly, points are awarded based on how many warriors survive until the end of a round. A warrior that survives by itself gets more points than a warrior that survives together with other warriors. Points are calculated from the formula (W*W-1)/S, where W is the total number of warriors and S the number of surviving warriors. The pMARS documentation has more information on multi-warrior scoring. The idea for an email-based Core War server came from David Lee. The original KotH was developed and run by William Shubert at Intel starting in 1991, and discontinued after almost three years of service. Currently, KotHs based on Bill's UNIX scripts but offering a wider variety of hills are are running at two sites: "koth@stormking.com" is maintained by Scott J. Ellentuch (tuc@stormking.com) and "pizza@ecst.csuchico.edu" by Thomas H. Davies (sd@ecst.csuchico.edu). Up until May '95, the two sites provided overlapping services, i.e. the some of the hill types were offered by both "pizza" and "stormking". To conserve resources, the different hill types are now divided up among the sites. The way you submit warriors to both KotHs is pretty much the same. Therefore, the entry rules described below apply to both "pizza" and "stormking" unless otherwise noted. Entry rules for King of the Hill Corewar: 1) Write a corewar program. KotH is fully ICWS '88 compatible, EXCEPT that a comma (",") is required between two arguments. 2) Put a line starting with ";redcode" (or ";redcode-94, etc., see below) at the top of your program. This MUST be the first line. Anything before it will be lost. If you wish to receive mail on every new entrant, use ";redcode verbose". Otherwise you will only receive mail if a challenger makes it onto the hill. Use ";redcode quiet" if you wish to receive mail only when you get shoved off the hill. (Also, see 5 below). Additionally, adding ";name " and ";author " will be helpful in the performance reports. Do NOT have a line beginning with ";address" in your code; this will confuse the mail daemon and you won't get mail back. In addition, it would be nice if you have lines beginning with ";strategy" that describe the algorithm you use. There are currently seven separate hills you can select by starting your program with ;redcode-b, ;redcode-94, ;redcode-94x, ;redcode, ;redcode-icws, ;redcode-94m or ;redcode-94xm. The former three run at "pizza", the latter four at "stormking". More information on these hills is listed below. 3) Mail this file to koth@stormking.com or pizza@ecst.csuchico.edu. "Pizza" requires a subject of "koth" (use the -s flag on most mailers). 4) Within a few minutes you should get mail back telling you whether your program assembled correctly or not. If it did assemble correctly, sit back and wait; if not, make the change required and re-submit. 5) In an hour or so you should get more mail telling you how your program performed against the current top 20 (or 10) programs. If no news arrives during that time, don't worry; entries are put in a queue and run through the tournament one at a time. A backlog may develop. Be patient. If your program makes it onto the hill, you will get mail every time a new program makes it onto the hill. If this is too much mail, you can use ";redcode[-??] quiet" when you first mail in your program; then you will only get mail when you make it on the top 20 list or when you are knocked off. Using ";redcode[-??] verbose" will give you even more mail; here you get mail every time a new challenger arrives, even if they don't make it onto the top 20 list. Often programmers want to try out slight variations in their programs. If you already have a program named "foo V1.0" on the hill, adding the line ";kill foo" to a new program will automatically bump foo 1.0 off the hill. Just ";kill" will remove all of your programs when you submit the new one. The server kills programs by assigning an impossibly low score; it may therefore take another successful challenge before a killed program is actually removed from the hill. SAMPLE ENTRY: ;redcode ;name Dwarf ;author A. K. Dewdney ;strategy Throw DAT bombs around memory, hitting every 4th memory cell. ;strategy This program was presented in the first Corewar article. bomb DAT #0 dwarf ADD #4, bomb MOV bomb, @bomb JMP dwarf END dwarf ; Programs start at the first line unless ; an "END start" pseudo-op appears to indicate ; the first logical instruction. Also, nothing ; after the END instruction will be assembled. Here are the Specs for the various hills: ICWS'88 Standard Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode", available at "stormking") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: ICWS '88 ICWS Annual Tournament Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-icws", available at "stormking") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8192 instructions max. processes: 8000 per program duration: After 100,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 300 minimum distance: 300 instruction set: ICWS '88 ICWS'94 Draft Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94", available at "pizza") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft ICWS'94 Beginner's Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-b", available at "pizza") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft max. age: after 100 successful challenges, warriors are retired. ICWS'94 Experimental (Big) Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94x", available at "pizza") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 55440 max. processes: 10000 duration: after 500,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 200 minimum distance: 200 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft ICWS'94 Draft Multi-Warrior Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94m", available at "stormking") hillsize: 10 warriors rounds: 200 coresize: 8000 max. processes: 8000 duration: after 80,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 100 minimum distance: 100 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft ICWS'94 Experimental (Big) Multi-Warrior Hill Specs: (Accessed with ";redcode-94xm", available at "stormking") hillsize: 20 warriors rounds: 100 coresize: 55440 max. processes: 10000 duration: after 500,000 cycles, a tie is declared. max. entry length: 200 minimum distance: 200 instruction set: extended ICWS '94 Draft If you just want to get a status report without actually challenging the hills, send email with ";status" as the message body (and don't forget "Subject: koth" for "pizza"). If you send mail to "pizza" with "Subject: koth help" you will receive instructions that may be more up to date than those contained in this document. At stormking, a message body with ";help" will return brief instructions. If you submit code containing a ";test" line, your warrior will be assembled but not actually pitted against the warriors on the hill. All hills run portable MARS (pMARS) version 0.8, a platform-independent corewar system available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. The '94 and '94x hills allow three experimental opcodes and addressing modes currently not covered in the ICWS'94 draft document: SEQ - Skip if EQual (synonym for CMP) SNE - Skip if Not Equal NOP - (No OPeration) * - indirect using A-field as pointer { - predecrement indirect using A-field } - postincrement indirect using A-field [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Is it DAT 0, 0 or DAT #0, #0? How do I compare to core? Core is initialized to DAT 0, 0. This is an "illegal" instruction under ICWS'88 rules and strictly compliant assemblers (such as KotH or pmars -8) will not let you write a DAT 0, 0 instruction - only DAT #0, #0. So this begs the question, how to compare something to see if it is empty core. The answer is, most likely the instruction before your first instruction and the instruction after your last instruction are both DAT 0, 0. You can use them, or any other likely unmodified instructions, for comparison. Note that under ICWS'94, DAT 0, 0 is a legal instruction. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ How does SLT (Skip if Less Than) work? SLT gives some people trouble because of the way modular arithmetic works. It is important to note that all negative numbers are converted to positive numbers before a battles begins. Example: (-1) becomes (M - 1) where M is the memory size. Once you realize that all numbers are treated as positive, it is clear what is meant by "less than". It should also be clear that no number is less than zero. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ What is the difference between in-register and in-memory evaluation? These terms refer to the way instruction operands are evaluated. The '88 Redcode standard ICWS'88 is unclear about whether a simulator should "buffer" the result of A-operand evaluation before the B-operand is evaluated. Simulators that do buffer are said to use in-register evaluation, those that don't, in-memory evaluation. ICWS'94 clears this confusion by mandating in-register evaluation. Instructions that execute differently under these two forms of evaluation are MOV, ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV and MOD where the effective address of the A-operand is modified by evaluation of the B-operand. This is best illustrated by an example: L1 mov L2, mov.i #0,impsize Bootstrapping Strategy of copying the active portion of the program away from the initial location, leaving a decoy behind and making the relocated program as small as possible. B-Scanners Scanners which only recognize non-zero B-fields. example add #10,scan scan jmz example,10 C Measure of speed, equal to one location per cycle. Speed of light. CMP-Scanner A Scanner which uses a CMP instruction to look for opponents. example add step,scan scan cmp 10,30 jmp attack jmp example step dat #20,#20 Color Property of bombs making them visible to scanners, causing them to attack useless locations, thus slowing them down. example dat #100 Core-Clear code that sequentially overwrites core with DAT instructions; usually the last part of a program. Decoys Bogus or unused instructions meant to slow down Scanners. Typically, DATs with non-zero B-fields. DJN-Stream (also DJN-Train) Using a DJN command to rapidly decrement core locations. example ... ... djn example,<4000 Dwarf the prototypical small bomber. Gate-busting (also gate-crashing) technique to "interweave" a decrement-resistant imp-spiral (e.g. MOV 0, 2668) with a standard one to overrun imp-gates. Hybrids warriors that combine two or more of the basic strategies, either in sequence (e.g. stone->paper) or in parallel (e.g. imp/stone). Imp Program which only uses the MOV instruction. example MOV 0, 1 or example MOV 0, 2 MOV 0, 2 Imp-Gate A location in core which is bombed or decremented continuously so that an Imp can not pass. Also used to describe the program-code which maintains the gate. example ... ... SPL 0, mov.i #0,impsize Mirror see reflection. On-axis/off-axis On-axis scanners compare two locations M/2 apart, where M is the memory size. Off-axis scanners use some other separation. Optimal Constants (also optima-type constants) Bomb or scan increments chosen to cover core most effectively, i.e. leaving gaps of uniform size. Programs to calculate optimal constants and lists of optimal numbers are available at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. Paper A Paper-like program. One which replicates itself many times. Part of the Scissors (beats) Paper (beats) Stone (beats Scissors) analogy. Pit-Trapper (also Slaver, Vampire). A program which enslaves another. Usually accomplished by bombing with JMPs to a SPL 0 pit with an optional core-clear routine. Quick Scan 2c scan of a set group of core locations with bombing if anything is found. Both of the following codes snips scan 16 locations and check for a find. If anything is found, it is attacked, otherwise 16 more locations are scanned. Example: start s1 for 8 ;'88 scan cmp start+100*s1, start+100*s1+4000 ;check two locations mov #start+100*s1-found, found ;they differ so set pointer rof jmn attack, found ;if we have something, get it s2 for 8 cmp start+100*(s2+6), start+100*(s2+6)+4000 mov #start+100*(s2+6)-found, found rof found jmz moveme, #0 ;skip attack if qscan found nothing attack cmp @found, start-1 ;does found points to empty space? add #4000, found ;no, so point to correct location mov start-1, @found ;move a bomb moveme jmp 0, 0 In ICWS'94, the quick scan code is more compact because of the SNE opcode: start ;'94 scan s1 for 4 sne start+400*s1, start+400*s1+100 ;check two locations seq start+400*s1+200, start+400*s1+300 ;check two locations mov #start+400*s1-found, found ;they differ so set pointer rof jmn which, found ;if we have something, get it s2 for 4 sne start+400*(s2+4), start+400*(s2+4)+100 seq start+400*(s2+4)+200, start+400*(s2+4)+300 mov #start+400*(s2+4)-found-100, found rof found jmz moveme, #0 ;skip attack if qscan found nothing add #100, -1 ;increment pointer till we get the which jmn -1, @found ;right place mov start-1, @found ;move a bomb moveme jmp 0, 0 Reflection Copy of a program or program part, positioned to make the active program invisible to a CMP-scanner. Replicator Generic for Paper. A program which makes many copies of itself, each copy also making copies. Self-Splitting Strategy of amplifying the number of processes executing a piece of code. example SPL 0 loop ADD #10, example MOV example, @example JMP loop Scanner A program which searches through core for an opponent rather than bombing blindly. Scissors A program designed to beat replicators, usually a (B-field scanning) vampire. Part of the Paper-Scissors-Stone analogy. Self-Repair Ability of a program to fix it's own code after attack. Silk A replicator which splits off a process to each new copy before actually copying the code. This allows it to replicate extremely quickly. This technique is only possible under the '94 draft, because it requires post-increment indirect addressing. Example: spl 1 mov.i -1, 0 spl 1 ;generate 6 consecutive processes silk spl 3620, #0 ;split to new copy mov.i >-1, }-1 ;copy self to new location mov.i bomb, >2000 ;linear bombing mov.i bomb, }2042 ;A-indirect bombing for anti-vamp jmp silk, {silk ;reset source pointer, make new copy bomb dat.f >2667, >5334 ;anti-imp bomb Slaver see Pit-Trapper. Stealth Property of programs, or program parts, which are invisible to scanners, accomplished by using zero B-fields and reflections. Stone A Stone-like program designed to be a small bomber. Part of the Paper-Scissors-Stone analogy. Stun A type of bomb which makes the opponent multiply useless processes, thus slowing it down. Example is referred to as a spl-jmp bomb. example spl 0 jmp -1 Two-Pass Core-Clear (also spl/dat Core-Clear) core clear that fills core first with SPL instructions, then with DATs. This is very effective in killing paper and certain imp-spiral variations. Vampire see Pit-Trapper. Vector Launch one of several means to start an imp-spiral running. As fast as Binary Launch, but requiring much less code. See also JMP/ADD Launch and Binary Launch. This example is one form of a Vector Launch: impsize equ 2667 example spl 1 ; extend by adding more spl 1's spl 1 djn.a @imp,#0 ; jmp @ a series of pointers dat #0,imp+(3*impsize) dat #0,imp+(2*impsize) dat #0,imp+(1*impsize) dat #0,imp+(0*impsize) imp mov.i #0,impsize [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Other questions? Just ask in the rec.games.corewar newsgroup or contact me (address below). If you are shy, check out the Core War archives first to see if your question has been answered before. [ToC] _________________________________________________________________ Credits Additions, corrections, etc. to this document are solicited. Thanks in particular to the following people who have contributed major portions of this document: Paul Kline, Randy Graham. Mark Durham wrote the first version of the FAQ. The rec.games.corewar FAQ is Copyright 1995 and maintained by: Stefan Strack, PhD stst@vuse.vanderbilt.edu Dept. Molecular Physiol. and Biophysics stst@idnsun.gpct.vanderbilt.edu Rm. 762, MRB-1 stracks@vuctrvax.bitnet Vanderbilt Univ. Medical Center Voice: +615-322-4389 Nashville, TN 37232-6600, USA FAX: +615-322-7236 _________________________________________________________________ $Id: corewar-faq.html,v 3.6 1995/10/12 22:44:37 stst Exp stst $ From: wtnewton@filter.nc5.infi.net (Terry) Subject: Re: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/25 Message-ID: <35ba1768.169203776@news.nc5.infi.net>#1/1 jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu wrote: >>Just got back from a couple of months underway, and I missed getting a >>copy of the new(er :) Win '95 compatible pMARS... could somebody repeat >>the URL? >> >>Tanx > >Well the first one is at www.koth.org/pmars, but another one was posted >at www.pknight.demon.co.uk/corewar/pmarsv.zip, but I haven't tried it >myself... anyone have success with it? I tried it... works fine except for one problem... no scores! If it gets tough, try the 286 pmarsv binary. It runs fine in graphics mode under windows, never crashes just a bit slow. But then again, the latest builds are too fast to see much... - Terry Newton Remove "filter." to email. From: wtnewton@filter.nc5.infi.net (Terry) Subject: Re: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/26 Message-ID: <35bb5edd.253045502@news.nc5.infi.net>#1/1 wtnewton@filter.nc5.infi.net (Terry) wrote: > I lost the version >without the 'press any key' so I'll be checking back... Never mind about the keypress before exit, all the builds have that. Don't know what I was thinking... - Terry Newton Remove "filter." to email. From: wtnewton@filter.nc5.infi.net (Terry) Subject: Re: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/26 Message-ID: <35bb52a8.249920229@news.nc5.infi.net>#1/1 phil@pknight.demon.co.uk (Phil Knight) wrote: >I've added a temporary fix to allow the scores to be displayed, but >now needs a key press to exit after display. still doesn't display scores for me... apparently the screen gets cleared when it switches back to text mode, might be a bug in my video card. As a workaround I modified my mars.bat shell to run it like this... pmarsv [options etc] > result$.out type result$.out del result$.out This works, but just running it doesn't. Computers.... > I'll look into a better >solution... No hurry on my account, found a fix. I lost the version without the 'press any key' so I'll be checking back... If it works on your system and no one else had the problem, I bet it's just something here. This version is the best one I've found for 95, no suggestions to run in msdos mode, no strange monitor effects. I like it. - Terry Newton Remove "filter." to email. From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Help with "The Math of Corewar Stepsizes" Date: 1998/07/26 Message-ID: <6pgdch$h37$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 M Joonas Pihlaja (jpihlaja@cc.helsinki.fi) wrote: : I'm having trouble understanding the proof of theorem 7 in Morell's paper. Substitute the following definitions for uses of the word "partition." Instead of saying that "the interval [d,e) is in the partition", try: "[d,e) is a well-formed interval" A well-formed interval is one in which d and e have been bombed but nothing else in the interval has been bombed. For example, this excerpt: "every interval of the form [d+g*K,e+g*K) with g>=0 is in the partition" becomes: "every interval of the form [d+g*K,e+g*K) with g>=0 is a well-formed interval" Then the proof by contradiction makes much more sense also. : I think that the Partition model could have been treated more thoroughly : before jumping right into the theorem of the section. Agreed. I'm still not sure exactly what Steven meant by a "partition." From: phil@pknight.demon.co.uk (Phil Knight) Subject: Re: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/26 Message-ID: <901468895.7380.0.nnrp-10.9e987dc5@news.demon.co.uk>#1/1 wtnewton@filter.nc5.infi.net (Terry) wrote: >jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu wrote: >>>Just got back from a couple of months underway, and I missed getting a >>>copy of the new(er :) Win '95 compatible pMARS... could somebody repeat >>>the URL? >>> >>>Tanx >> >>Well the first one is at www.koth.org/pmars, but another one was posted >>at www.pknight.demon.co.uk/corewar/pmarsv.zip, but I haven't tried it >>myself... anyone have success with it? >I tried it... works fine except for one problem... no scores! >If it gets tough, try the 286 pmarsv binary. It runs fine >in graphics mode under windows, never crashes just a bit slow. >But then again, the latest builds are too fast to see much... >- Terry Newton I've added a temporary fix to allow the scores to be displayed, but now needs a key press to exit after display. I'll look into a better solution... -- Phil From: jwilkinson@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Re: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/26 Message-ID: <199807252148.RAA12519@valhalla.stormking.com>#1/1 >Just got back from a couple of months underway, and I missed getting a >copy of the new(er :) Win '95 compatible pMARS... could somebody repeat >the URL? > >Tanx Well the first one is at www.koth.org/pmars, but another one was posted at www.pknight.demon.co.uk/corewar/pmarsv.zip, but I haven't tried it myself... anyone have success with it? -jkw From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Core War for Linux. Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <35BC68B2.3C9DE689@dialup.isc.tuc.gr>, Nikolaos Ntarmos wrote >Is there such a thing as Core War for Linux/Alpha? Definitely: just grab a copy of the pMARS source (see my pages for details of where) and compile them. Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm / From: Nikolaos Ntarmos Subject: Core War for Linux. Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <35BC68B2.3C9DE689@dialup.isc.tuc.gr>#1/1 Is there such a thing as Core War for Linux/Alpha? Please reply to darmnik@dialup.isc.tuc.gr or ccompiler@yahoo.com. Tks in advance. Bye,Nick. From: M Joonas Pihlaja Subject: Re: Help a Newbie? (Booting and Decoys) Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: #1/1 On 27 Jul 1998, David Matthew Moore wrote: > David Matthew Moore (mooredav@cps.msu.edu) wrote: > : Here's the scan loop: > > : add.f step, 1 > : mov }ptr1, @ptr2 ; 33%c decoy > : jmz.f -2, @-1 ; 66%c scanner > > > okay, I see the error in my ways. A true 66%c scanner would be like this: > > add.f step, 1 > mov ptr1, @ptr2 ; no a-field } > jmz.f -2, @-1 > > but that has no decoy. That explains why Red Carpet never scored > as well as I thought it should. > > Oh well, that trick is still useful in 88 code. I made that same mistake with my first oneshot Beescan :) Blurstone corrected that by using: add step,1 mov ptr1,#1/1 David Matthew Moore wrote: > > cgbean@alaska.net wrote: > : Paul-V Khuong wrote: > : > > : > Is it me or corewar is far mopre active at night than earlier? > : > > : Well, you know us nerds... > > Hey wait a minute. Who are you calling a nerd? > > Core War is a fun game for cool people. New inventions and clever tricks > which smite the enemy to dust while you become KING. > Now that is far from lame. I never said it was lame...but just to appease you... Well, you know me, the nerd, and the rest, the cool people. =) -WFB From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - MultiWarrior 94 07/27/98 Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <199807270400.AAA26894@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/27/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Multiwarrior 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Thu Jul 16 16:44:55 EDT 1998 # Name Author Score Age 1 aTest 4 P. Kline 5030 4 2 Failure John Metcalf 5030 9 3 Aulder Man Ian Oversby 5030 49 4 mTest P. Kline 5030 10 5 CyberBunny Compudemon 5018 14 6 U-lat v3.8 Zul Nadzri 5018 27 7 Fleas 2 Mike M. 5018 2 8 Time to send in the imps Robert Hale 5018 20 9 paper test Ken Espiritu 4994 1 10 aTest 4 P. Kline 4982 5 11 Quicker Pulp Mike M. 4982 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - ICWS Experimental 94 07/27/98 Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <199807270400.AAA26898@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/27/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG ICWS Experimental 94 CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Thu Jul 23 19:26:28 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 43/ 12/ 45 Venom v0.2b Christian Schmidt 174 16 2 35/ 5/ 61 Evol Cap 4 X John Wilkinson 164 63 3 30/ 2/ 67 Evolve X v4.0 John Wilkinson 158 11 4 35/ 14/ 51 Rosebud Beppe 156 42 5 42/ 34/ 24 Dr. Gate X Franz 149 34 6 38/ 34/ 28 BigBoy Robert Macrae 142 88 7 27/ 14/ 59 Sphere v0.2 Christian Schmidt 140 5 8 39/ 38/ 23 Stepping Stone 94x Kurt Franke 140 49 9 42/ 46/ 12 S.E.T.I. 4-X JKW 139 64 10 29/ 19/ 52 Purple v0.1 Christian Schmidt 139 15 11 38/ 37/ 25 13 Christian Schmidt 139 1 12 34/ 33/ 33 Lithium X 8 John K Wilkinson 136 54 13 36/ 37/ 27 Dr. Recover Franz 135 33 14 38/ 42/ 19 Pagan John K W 134 48 15 38/ 43/ 20 Tsunami v0.1 Ian Oversby 132 41 16 38/ 44/ 19 Memories Beppe Bezzi 132 70 17 39/ 46/ 15 BiShot Christian Schmidt 131 2 18 31/ 31/ 38 Falcon v0.3 X Ian Oversby 130 36 19 41/ 51/ 8 HSA Copy 55440 Robert Macrae 130 31 20 36/ 43/ 22 Bob the ImpStoneer Sean McDonald 129 9 21 2/ 98/ 0 getting strategy lines mjp 7 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - 94 No Pspace 07/27/98 Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <199807270400.AAA26902@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/27/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG 94 No Pspace CoreWar Hill: Last battle concluded at : Sun Jul 26 07:40:49 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 45/ 37/ 19 scan test 1 Anonymous 152 1 2 45/ 46/ 9 Red Carpet David Moore 143 12 3 41/ 40/ 19 The Machine Anton Marsden 143 44 4 33/ 28/ 39 Baseline Plus Ken Espiritu 138 36 5 33/ 29/ 38 Fixed Ken Espiritu 138 38 6 32/ 27/ 41 Vain Ian Oversby 136 55 7 42/ 50/ 7 HeScans P.Kline 135 3 8 32/ 29/ 39 Newt Ian Oversby 135 56 9 23/ 12/ 65 The Fugitive David Moore 134 57 10 29/ 25/ 46 Pulp v0.4 Ian Oversby 134 54 11 34/ 36/ 30 Sphere Christian Schmidt 133 5 12 29/ 26/ 45 Freight Train v0.2 David Moore 132 19 13 29/ 26/ 45 Gemini Dream John K Wilkinson 131 61 14 36/ 40/ 24 Floody River P.Kline 131 4 15 31/ 32/ 37 Shadow Christian Schmidt 129 13 16 32/ 35/ 33 Alien Christian Schmidt 129 32 17 30/ 32/ 38 Head or Tail Christian Schmidt 129 26 18 38/ 48/ 14 Eggbeater Anton Marsden 128 45 19 28/ 30/ 43 Faces 0.1 Csaba Biro 126 6 20 30/ 35/ 36 fTest P.Kline 124 2 21 9/ 16/ 74 Redemption John Metcalf 103 0 From: KOTH Subject: KOTH.ORG: Status - Standard 07/27/98 Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <199807270400.AAA26890@midgaard.ttsg.com>#1/1 Weekly Status on 07/27/98 -=- www.KOTH.org is now hosting a '94 No Pspace Hill. -=- View the stats of all the Hills at: www.KOTH.org/standings.html -=- *FAQ* page located at: www.KOTH.org/corewar-faq.html Current Status of the KOTH.ORG Standard KotH CoreWar Hill : Last battle concluded at : Sat Jul 18 14:48:47 EDT 1998 # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 40/ 19/ 41 Freight Train David Moore 161 15 2 36/ 20/ 44 Guardian Ian Oversby 152 14 3 44/ 40/ 17 Foggy Swamp Beppe Bezzi 148 11 4 42/ 41/ 17 Blur '88 Anton Marsden 144 52 5 41/ 39/ 20 Stasis David Moore 144 122 6 39/ 34/ 27 Leapfrog David Moore 144 43 7 40/ 39/ 20 Beholder's Eye V1.7 W. Mintardjo 142 290 8 42/ 42/ 16 Iron Gate Wayne Sheppard 142 340 9 39/ 37/ 24 Tangle Trap David Moore 141 88 10 39/ 37/ 25 Kitchen Sink Robert Macrae 141 13 11 39/ 37/ 24 PacMan David Moore 141 44 12 42/ 45/ 13 Blurstone '88 M. J. Pihlaja 139 9 13 24/ 9/ 67 Trident^2 '88 John K W 138 38 14 27/ 17/ 56 EV Paper John K Wilkinson 138 28 15 29/ 21/ 49 Evoltmp 88 John K W 138 65 16 28/ 19/ 52 Test I Ian Oversby 137 71 17 39/ 42/ 19 Gisela 8623 Andrzej Maciejczak 137 8 18 29/ 24/ 47 Simple '88 Ian Oversby 135 101 19 29/ 25/ 46 CAPS KEY IS STUCK AGAIN Steven Morrell 134 212 20 22/ 33/ 44 Flame lance P._V._K. 112 1 21 0/ 94/ 6 : microgate : Joel Bushart 6 0 From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Help, how do I remove a warrior Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <6ph0t4$l0k$2@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 John Metcalf (John.Metcalf@p18.f94.chaos.camelot.co.uk) wrote: : How do I delete a warrior from Stormking's KoTH? A little test : I send did better than I though, and now I want to get rid of it. John. I wouldn't call that a "little" test: # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 45/ 37/ 19 scan test 1 Anonymous 152 1 Anyway, try submitting an entry like: ;redcode-nop ;name kill it ;author jm ;assert 1 ;kill scan test 1 dat 0,0 the next time that a real submission occurs then your program should fall off the hill. If your email matches the previous one it should work. However, there may be a problem with koth. I tried to kill one of my own programs but still no response. From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: activity Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <6ph07c$l0k$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 cgbean@alaska.net wrote: : Paul-V Khuong wrote: : > : > Is it me or corewar is far mopre active at night than earlier? : > : Well, you know us nerds... Hey wait a minute. Who are you calling a nerd? Core War is a fun game for cool people. New inventions and clever tricks which smite the enemy to dust while you become KING. Now that is far from lame. From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Yes, I see...Sorta... Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <6pgtie$d07$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 Haarg2 (bjlc@globalnet.co.uk) wrote: : I have heard paper, scissors, stone alot and I can probably hazard a guess : but would any one be so kind as to tell me? I'm assuming that you've played the paper-rock-scissors game before. In Core War, you can play a really advanced computerized version of that game. Here's an experiment that you can try. Get a copy of Rave, Twill, and Flashpaper. Run them against each other and look at the scores. Here's what I got: Rave by Stefan Strack scores 116 Twill by Andy Pierce scores 176 Results: 36 56 8 Twill by Andy Pierce scores 13 Flash Paper3.7 by Matt Hastings scores 277 Results: 1 89 10 Flash Paper3.7 by Matt Hastings scores 101 Rave by Stefan Strack scores 179 Results: 27 53 20 So which is the best program? Well, let's look at what they do: Twill is a stone (a.k.a "rock" and "dwarf"). Characteristics are: 1. bombs with DAT (or other harmful instructions) a. has an ADD or SUB line to help distribute bombs b. if there are no ADD or SUB lines, then it's probably just a core-clear and we don't call that a stone 2. does not scan 3. small size, because only short code is needed to implement that attack Flashpaper is a replicator (a.k.a "paper"). It protects itself from DAT bombs by making copies. That extra redundancy helps it to beat DAT bombers like Twill. Rave is a scissors program since it shreds Flashpaper into little pieces. Well, it isn't really "shredding" anything but it does bomb with SPLs. It scans for a copy of Flashpaper and then carpets the entire copy with SPLs... filling Flashpaper's process que with completely useless pointers. This attack fills Flashpaper's que much faster than Flashpaper can replicate. Since Flashpaper makes copies everywhere, it is easy to find and therefore particularly vulnerable to Rave's attack. In general, a scissors program paralyzes the enemy by filling the opponent's que with lots of useless processes. The problem is that additional code is needed to finish killing the enemy; this extra code makes scissors programs relatively large. That size disadvantage makes Rave a loser when fighting Twill. From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Help a Newbie? (Booting and Decoys) Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <6pgpr1$1fa$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 M Joonas Pihlaja (jpihlaja@cc.helsinki.fi) wrote: : Another type of decoy is created by Tornado 3.0 It uses "only" a 2c : decoy maker with additional dat bombing. Instead of moving previous : decrements around, it moves honest core possibly catching an opponent : booting. The difference here is the spread of decoy. Well, if you like decoys that bomb then how about: bomb dat {1, <1 decoy mov bomb, decoy+100 mov {decoy+101, decoy+200 mov #1/1 David Matthew Moore (mooredav@cps.msu.edu) wrote: : Here's the scan loop: : add.f step, 1 : mov }ptr1, @ptr2 ; 33%c decoy : jmz.f -2, @-1 ; 66%c scanner okay, I see the error in my ways. A true 66%c scanner would be like this: add.f step, 1 mov ptr1, @ptr2 ; no a-field } jmz.f -2, @-1 but that has no decoy. That explains why Red Carpet never scored as well as I thought it should. Oh well, that trick is still useful in 88 code. From: mooredav@cps.msu.edu (David Matthew Moore) Subject: Re: Help a Newbie? (Booting and Decoys) Date: 1998/07/27 Message-ID: <6pgjg2$bvd$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>#1/1 M Joonas Pihlaja (jpihlaja@cc.helsinki.fi) wrote: : the decoy should trigger a cmp-scanner with many : different separations... Variety is a bit difficult to create though. Hmm... why not substitute the first mov with a nop. Then you get some 1's to complement your -1's. Like this: nop >dc+D+0 , }dc+D+4 mov {dc+D+1 , {dc+D+3 mov dc+D+0, }dc+D+0 ; trigger a one-shot when its djn.f hits here mov {dc+D+1, etc.... I've been experimenting with a different kind of decoy-maker, which is used by Red Carpet on the nop hill. It's actually an scanner which happens to leave some color behind. Here's the scan loop: add.f step, 1 mov }ptr1, @ptr2 ; 33%c decoy jmz.f -2, @-1 ; 66%c scanner Study this and you will see that it is indeed a 33%c f-scanner plus a 33%c b-scanner. Even if the opponent uses 0 in the b-field, the invisible location still gets bombed. In 88 code, this can be used to make a smaller 66%c scanner, but without > and } you can't make decoy. From: John.Metcalf@p18.f94.chaos.camelot.co.uk (John Metcalf) Subject: Decrementing while scanning Date: 1998/07/28 Message-ID: #1/1 DMM> okay, I see the error in my ways. A true 66%c scanner would DMM> be like this DMM> add.f step, 1 DMM> mov ptr1, @ptr2 ; no a-field } DMM> jmz.f -2, @-1 DMM> but that has no decoy. That explains why Red Carpet never scored DMM> as well as I thought it should. I use this snippet of code in my unsuccessful WannaChatInWarriorNames? add.f step, 1 sne.i ptr1, ptr2 djn.f -2, @-1 This gets in the decrement and is a .66c scanner. However it acts slightly differently to David's code. Perhaps a sne.x may be better. Of course, I may have entirely misunderstood what you are trying to do :-) Cheers, John From: wtnewton@filter.nc5.infi.net (Terry) Subject: Re: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/29 Message-ID: <35bef0d7.487058229@news.nc5.infi.net>#1/1 Don Garrett wrote: > pmarsv [options etc] > pause On my machine, running that way results in no scores being displayed, just a Press any key . . . at the top. That was my original problem, which redirection solved. I do not know why just running it doesn't work, my guess is my video card clears the screen when switching between graphics and text, preventing the scores from being seen. Or some other bug, none of the other versions do this. Redirecting to a file then displaying it always works with all versions, irregardless of display flakes, so that's how I rigged my batch. Problem solved. - Terry Newton Remove "filter." to email. From: Don Garrett Subject: Re: Out of the loop for a while... Date: 1998/07/29 Message-ID: <35BF6FBD.BEBFB96C@acm.org>#1/1 Terry wrote: > > phil@pknight.demon.co.uk (Phil Knight) wrote: > > >I've added a temporary fix to allow the scores to be displayed, but > >now needs a key press to exit after display. > > still doesn't display scores for me... apparently the screen > gets cleared when it switches back to text mode, might be a > bug in my video card. As a workaround I modified my mars.bat > shell to run it like this... > > pmarsv [options etc] > result$.out > type result$.out > del result$.out > > This works, but just running it doesn't. Computers.... > > > I'll look into a better > >solution... This would be a bit less convoluted. pmarsv [options etc] pause -- Don Garrett dgarrett@acm.org BGB Consulting http://www.bgb-consulting.com/garrett From: cgbean@alaska.net Subject: Core Warrior Date: 1998/07/29 Message-ID: <35BE9DD4.3593@alaska.net>#1/1 Hi all. Hope you didn't think this was CW...well, unless my new server has crashed again, CW hasn't been out for awhile. So, I have an article idea...why not do an "Improving a Beginner's Warrior", in the manner of Mutegen. Take say, the 10 place warrior on the -b hill, oh, say, one with that starts with the letter "W". And, how about the author's name also starting with a "W"? So it should be something like... 10| 32.3|23.6|44.1| Weasel| WFB|141.0| 2| Yes...that seems right... seriously, I was wondering if their would be any interest in an article recapping, and diving deeper into the history of Core War. Say, a report on the first such type of game, the first warrior on any internet hill, and a talk with A.K. Dewdney about the creation of Core War. And more, if there's anything else interesting. Well, opinions? -WFB From: Philip Kendall Subject: Re: Core Warrior Date: 1998/07/30 Message-ID: #1/1 In article <35BE9DD4.3593@alaska.net>, cgbean@alaska.net wrote >Hi all. Hope you didn't think this was CW...well, unless my new server >has crashed again, CW hasn't been out for awhile. So, I have an article >idea...why not do an "Improving a Beginner's Warrior", in the manner of >Mutegen. Ummm... did you read CW 66? :-) >seriously, I was wondering if their would be any interest in an article >recapping, and diving deeper into the history of Core War. Say, a >report on the first such type of game, the first warrior on any internet >hill, and a talk with A.K. Dewdney about the creation of Core War. And >more, if there's anything else interesting. Well, opinions? I don't really think it's a suitable article for CW, which is intended to be more about where the game is today, and where it's going, rather than the history. Write it and stick it on a Web page though :-) Phil -- / Philip Kendall (pak21@cam.ac.uk pak21@kendalls.demon.co.uk) \ \ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/5427/corewar.htm /