Core War KotH Competition Live

------------------------------

Core War is the original program-vs-program battle game, where short

assembly programs battle for their own existence within the shared

memory of a virtual machine. "King of the Hill"-style Core War

battles maintain a set of competing programs and allowing people to

submit challenger programs in an attempt to displace an existing

program on the hill.

I think this game is a really good fit for the slow internet, as

competitions take place completely asynchronously and can last a long

time. Thus I'm excited to announce that my own Core War KotH server

is finally online!

To learn more about the game or to submit a challenger program, head

over to the KotH page [1].

Given the nature of this gopherhole, it should be no surprise to learn

that the simulator itself [2] is written entirely in Scheme by yours

truly. This has two implications:

1. The redcode simulator is completely new and based entirely on my

own reading of the ICWS'94 draft [3]. It is thus possible (i.e.

incredibly likely) that it contains bugs. If you run into any

of these, feel free to leave feedback [2].

2. The parser currently only supports the subset redcode assembly

prescribed for "load files", meaning that useful higher-level

constructs such as address labeling are unsupported. Further, all

address modes must be explicitly given. See chapter 3 of the

ICWS'94 draft [3] for details.

Good luck!

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[1] gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/koth/

[2] gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/projects/jars/

[3] gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/0/docs/icws94.txt