The Second ICPC

Christian Schmidt recently announced the Second International Corewar Programming Contest with a concept similar to the new DynaHill.

The hill will be initialised with a pool of 3800 published warriors. Entries will compete against programs in their neighbourhood and move up or down depending on their score.

An interesting twist is the chance to enter warriors in 8 different categories including '94, '88, LP and nano. For full details of the rules see the official tournament page.

The deadline is 15^th September. Good luck :-)

Corewar Programming Contest

The First International Corewar Programming Contest has just been announced, with a first prize of $50 sponsored by www.corewar.info.

The competition takes place in the unexplored area between '94nop and LP settings which has recently been investigated by Fizmo in Redcode Talk.

The exact settings are as follows:

Standard:	CWS'94
Coresize:	8000
Processes:	200
Entry length:	20
Points win:	3
Points tie:	1
Cycles:	80000
Rounds:	1000

The pMARS command line is pmars -p 200 -l 20 -r 1000. STP and LDP are forbidden, up to two entries are allowed and battles will take part in a round-robin tournament.

For more information, take a look at the announcement in rec.games.corewar.

Mini Challenge #7 - Results

Neo's Corewar Mini Challenge #7 is over and the results are in.

Mini Challenge #7 - Part 1

In part 1, 6 players discovered a 1 line solution with 100% ties. In all of the entered solutions, the imp overwrites the wimp and the wimp's process becomes an imp.

Roy van Rijn and Rashnok found the following solution:

    mov.i #1, }1

Neogryzor and S. Fernandes discovered the following:

    mov }0, }1

And finally, Ilmari Karonen and I entered the following:

    mov.i #1, *1

Mini Challenge #7 - Part 2

In part 2, 5 players found a 2 line, 1 process solution with 100% ties.

Ilmari Karonen was first to submit an optimal solution. Ilmari's imp stops when it reaches the wimp and the process enters the DJN loop:

    mov.i }0, *1
    mov.i }1, *1

Rashnok and I both found the following solution. Our imp overwrites the wimp and the wimp's process becomes an imp:

imp mov.i #3,*-1
    jmp imp,{0

I also entered a slight variation:

    mov {2, }0
imp mov.i #3,*-1

S. Fernandes discovered the following. The imp's process enters the DJN loop:

imp mov.i #4, *1
    djn.a imp, #0

Finally Roy van Rijn used his evolver to discover 58 solutions! Here are Roy's 58 entries.

Thanks to Neo for organising the challenge.

Roy's Modification to Mini Challenge #7

Roy suggested an interesting modification to Neo's Mini Challenge #7 in rec.games.corewar. Create an imp capable of passing through the following code:

djn.f #0, >-5

The aim is to tie as often as possible.  Lines of code and the number of processes should be kept to a minimum.

• Newbies should aim for >95% ties in 7 lines or less.
  
• Intermediate redcoders should be able to discover a solution with 100% ties in 5 lines.
  
• Corewar pros should aim for a solution with 100% ties in 4 lines or less!

Mini Challenge #7 - "Harmless Overrun"

Neo has proposed a mini challenge in which players have to create an imp capable of passing through a wimp with imp-gate.  Both warriors must survive the encounter.

jmp 0, <-5 

For more details, see the mini challenge homepage.