[SavantIdiot]

RobotWar lives![1] Yay!

I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/

Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified.

Never heard of Faas Wars but now I'm excited to see what it is like. These programming-based games are way more fun, IMHO, than hackathons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar

[2] http://corewars.org/

[someguyorother]

> Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified.

The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores.

I wonder if one could make a better ML system than genetic programming for creating CoreWar warriors. Perhaps a neural net connected to a differentiable SAT solver?

[SavantIdiot]

> The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores.

That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much./

In fact, it's been about 12 years since I last played around with CoreWars, so I'm not up on the newest theories.

It would be interesting to see how a genetic algorithm fares against current ML strategies. I'm completely in the dark as to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero work, I only know classifiers/SSD/autoencoders. Would be fun to learn with this environment tho.

[someguyorother]

> That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much.

It's simply the combinatorial explosion: it's easier to find a surprising and good program in ten lines with pointers limited to a max value of 800, than with hundred lines and a pointer max value of 8000.

[ralphc]

Mid-80s there was crobots, you programmed the robots with a subset of C.