First Results from a New Corewar Evolver

Over the last few days I've been working on a short program written in GWBasic to evolve Corewar programs. After a test run earlier today, plateau entered SAL's nano hill:

;redcode-nano
;name plateau
;author John Metcalf
;strategy evolved mad mad bomber
;strategy hit a plateau after 4 hours
;assert CORESIZE==80

spl.b #16,  <28
mov.i <-15, {-35
mov.i {-1,  {-3
mov.i <-28, <25
djn.f $-3,  <33
end

The evolver creates warriors through pure evolution. The soup is seeded with random instructions and evolution is guided only by performance against the 2007 Nano Benchmark. If a benchmark test is scoring below a certain threshold, the test breaks out early.

Evolution is by mutation only. Crossover, insertion and deletion are not implemented. The lower a warrior scores, the more it is changed by mutation. After each round, a high scoring program replaces a randomly chosen low scoring program.

Here are the plans for the next version:

• keep a checksum of warriors to prevent duplicates in the pool
• add a hint mode, but to keep it pure it'll hint what we don't want
• implement crossover
• think of a decent name (I think revolver is already taken)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.