Tuesday 25 August 2009

Maezumo, Evolving for the Corewar Tiny Hill with a Twist

Maezumo, the Evolver with a TwistAt the beginning of August, Christian Schmidt released version 1.04 of Maezumo, his corewar evolver. If you're familiar with the old version the biggest difference you'll notice are the additions to the progress report.

Maezumo evolves warriors using traditional mutation, keeping a hill of the top warriors. Hill warriors are then injected back into the soup. Where Maezumo offers something innovative is in the hint modes.

If the hint modes are enabled, Maezumo generates warriors from inbuilt templates. These challenge the hill and if successful enter the soup for further enhancement by the mutation algorithm.

Maezumo is supplied with a Windows binary, Basic source code and all the necessary support files. To evolve for the tiny hill, I simply extracted the archived, changed the settings in maezumo.ini and double clicked maezumo.exe. I selected the scanner/paper hint mode to cover the two most successful tiny strategies.

After a 13 hour run, the top warrior on Maezumo's hill is an evolved style paper which scores 75 against SAL's tiny hill. I think it would be realistic to expect a strong tiny warrior after a 3 or 4 day run.

Have you tried Maezumo yet? If so, let me know your thoughts :-)