An Early Description of Core War

Until I saw this description of Core War I assumed Dewdney and Jones were the first to use the term in the Core War Guidelines.

“Core war is a game surreptitiously played by systems programmers on large installations, where a player's goal in each fixed time slice of real time is to propagate his program elsewhere in memory, while doing as much “damage” (read: clearing to zero) as possible at random places in the hopes of causing the opponent's program to blow up. The game of core war is rarely mentioned with more than a whisper, and thus tends to be lost amid the din of easier and less abstract games such as Star Trek, Adventure or Dungeons and Dragons”

-- BYTE Magazine, July 1978, page 106-107

This brief description was published 6 years before A. K. Dewdney's first Core War article in Scientific American (May 1984, page 14-22).

Have you seen any other early mentions of Core War?

Revisiting the Dragon Curve

A few days ago I published code to draw the Heighway Dragon Curve. Here's a variation that's 3 lines shorter and plots the curve in 655360 cycles. The pMARS command line is pmarsv -s 90000 -c 1000000.

;redcode-fractal
;name Dragon Curve 2
;author John Metcalf

        width  equ 315
        stack  equ dragon+100
        plot   equ direct+width+1
        first  equ 80*width+50

        mov    #first,   plot
dragon  mov.ab count,    <plot
test    mov.b  @plot,    #0
        add.ba @plot,    direct
        div    #2,       @plot
        mod    #2,       test
        jmz    test,     test
        mod.a  #4,       direct
direct  add.b  3,        width+1
count   sub.ba #65536,   #1+1
        jmp    dragon,   -width+1

Dragon Curve in Redcode

The Heighway Dragon Curve is fractal line than goes through a series of 90° turns, creating a pattern which fills a 2 dimensional space. The program plots 32768 points in 458741 cycles. The pMARS command line is pmarsv -s 90000 -c 500000.

;redcode-fractal
;name Dragon Curve
;author John Metcalf

        width  equ 315
        stack  equ dragon+100

dragon  mov.x  paira,    <stack
recur   djn    dragon,   #15
        mod.a  #4,       direct
        add.b  *direct,  plot
plot    mov    >recur,   80*width+110
        mov.ba >stack,   ret
ret     jmp    0,        }stack
turn    add.a  @stack,   direct
        mov.x  pairb,    <stack
        jmp    recur

direct  dat    3,        width
paira   dat    turn-ret, -1
        dat    0,        -width
pairb   dat    plot-ret, 1

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.