Core War Hill

Core War is a game where players write programs in an invented assembly language to run on an invented virtual machine. The programs are able to sabotage each other, and the last one standing is the winner. The programs are known as "warriors" in Core War terminology, and a "hill" is a long-running competition to create warriors that defeat and replace the warriors already on the hill.

For more information, I would recommend reading the beginner's guide to Redcode by Ilmari Karonen.

My hill works as follows:

• There are three positions on the hill: A, B, and C.
• When you submit a warrior, you specify which position you wish it to fill.
• When a warrior is submitted, I will run the warriors against each other using the "tabulator" program in my lib94 project. Note that this means you cannot use P-space. Read the readme.txt file in that project for more information about the particular standard used. That project also includes a "bench" program to test out warriors using the same implementation.
• Let WA be the warrior in position A, WB be the warrior in position B, WC be the warrior in position C, and W be the submitted warrior. Let s(X, Y) be the proportion of times X beats Y.
• W unseats WA if s(W, WA) > s(WA, W) and s(W, WB) > s(WA, WB).
• W unseats WB if s(W, WB) > s(WB, W) and s(W, WC) > s(WB, WC).
• W unseats WC if s(W, WC) > s(WC, W) and s(W, WA) > s(WC, WA).

The hope is that this leads to an arrangement like rock paper scissors where WA beats WB beats WC beats WA. In Core War, the term "stone" is already used to refer to small warriors that quickly "bomb" random addresses, the term "paper" for warriors that replicate themselves and spread out as much as possible, and the term "scissors" for complex warriors that search out other warriors and trap them. The rock paper scissors analysis does generally apply to warriors using these strategies, but it is by no means the only possible arrangement. I think it will be interesting to see what sort of dynamics happen, especially when warriors are designed with specific warriors to beat in mind.

Below you can see the current state of the hill and the history of states. To submit a warrior, just send me an email with your warrior's source code and the position you wish it to fill, and I will run it against the relevant warriors as described above and let you know what happens. If it wins, it will be placed on the hill and this page will be updated. Please make sure to test your warrior under the program above before sending it, as my program may work a bit differently from some other ones.

All of the tables below list the number of wins of the column header against the row header.

November 25th, 2023

To start off, I just took three warriors I had sitting around. Warrior A is Epson, by me. Warrior B is Imp, a standard warrior. Warrior C is Dwarf, a standard warrior.