Core War

Core War (or Core Wars) is a programming game in which two or more battle programs (called warriors) compete for the control of the MARS virtual computer (Memory Array Redcode Simulator). more...

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These battle programs are written in an abstract assembly language called Redcode. The object of the game is to cause all processes of the opposing program(s) to terminate, leaving your program in sole possession of the machine.

History

Core War was in part inspired by a game called Darwin, written by Victor A. Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and M. Douglas McIlroy at the Bell Labs in the 1960s.

The first description of the Redcode language was published in March 1984, in Core War Guidelines by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney. The game was introduced to the public in May 1984, in an article written by Dewdney in Scientific American (\"Computer Recreations\" - In the game called Core War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits). Dewdney revisited Core War in his \"Computer Recreations\" article in March 1985, and again in January 1987.

The International Core War Society (ICWS) was founded in 1985, one year after Dewdney's original article. ICWS published new standards for the Redcode language in 1986 and 1988, and proposed an update in 1994 that was never formally set as the new standard. Nonetheless, the 1994 draft was commonly adopted and extended, and forms the basis for the de facto standard for Redcode today. The ICWS was directed by Mark Clarkson (1985–1987), William R. Buckley (1987–1992), and Jon Newman (1992–); currently the ICWS is defunct.

In 1991, the newsgroup rec.games.corewar was created. Up to now it remains the most prolific source of Core War related information. Most articles and newsletters on Core War have been published in this newsgroup.

Redcode

Both Redcode and the MARS environment are designed to provide a simple and abstract platform without the complexity of actual computers and processors. Although Redcode is meant to resemble an ordinary CISC assembly language, it differs in many ways from \"real\" assembly:

Redcode has very few operations — 10 in ICWS-88 and 16 in ICWS-94.; Each assembled instruction is divided into an instruction code and two numeric fields. No numeric value is defined for the instruction code. The code may only be copied as part of an entire instruction, and may only be compared for equality.; Besides the opcode and two numeric operands, ICWS-94 allows each Redcode instruction to have a modifier that defines the size (one field, both fields, or entire instruction) of the data that the instructions operates on. Additionally, each of the numeric fields has associated addressing mode. ICWS-88 defines 4 addressing modes, and ICWS-94 extends this number to 8.; Each Redcode instruction has the same length and takes the same time to execute. The memory is addressed in units of one instruction.; All numbers are unsigned (i.e. non-negative) integers less than the size of the memory. Therefore there is a one-to-one correspondence between numbers and memory locations. All arithmetic is done modulo the size of the memory.; Only relative addressing is used. That is, address 0 always refers to the currently executing instruction, address 1 to the instruction after it, and so on. Addresses past the end of the memory wrap around to the beginning. This way, a program cannot (and need not) know its absolute location in the memory.;

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