Core War is a game where you write programs that fight each other in the memory of a virtual machine. For more details, see:
If you're in the USA, you'll certainly get faster access with the mirror of this page on the SKI server (Send your Kudos bars to Tuc).
A hill big enough to accomodate all warriors at once. You can see the current status.
A list of the warrriors that were most recently modified or added to my collection.
These are also available by ftp.
01; 02; 03; 04; 05; 06; 07; 08; 09; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14;
March 1993
10;
17;
24;
31;
April 1993
07;
14;
21;
29;
May 1993
06;
13;
19;
28;
June 1993
08;
16;
22;
July 1993
02;
20;
28;
August 1993
25;
September 1993
07;
15;
23;
29;
October 1993
13;
25;
November 1993
04;
January 1994
27;
February 1994
09;
These are the issues that I found on the ftp site. I merged them into
one PostScript file each. They are compressed with gzip.
Spring 1992 (862k) (may not print on all
printers);
Summer 1992 (23k);
Fall 1992 (20k);
Winter 1993 (20k);
Winter 1994 (11k);
Fall 1994 (17k);
John Wilkinson's collection of warriors for beginners. Get ready for fighting the hill. Practice your warriors against this selection. Check out the Wilkies page on StormKing. You'll also find a lot of benchmark scores on Scott Manley's Core War page.
These are warriors that I collected from various sources (mostly from rec.games.corewar and the ftp site). Some of these are not complete warriors (missing constants or components). I have tried to put back the decoys when they were omitted by the authors, but I won't take a guess at the constants, except the boot distances.
When looking at the old warriors written for the experimental hill, remember that the rules for that hill have changed through time. Most notably, at some point it implemented read/write limits. This explains a number of moving-but-not-replicating warriors.
Each warrior is presented on one line of text. Let's take a
randomly-chosen example:
Aleph 0 (Jay "Thierry" Han) 1994-05-26 [post] vamp,stun,clear,stone,imp
In the listing by author name, the author's name is omitted, unless this is a co-authored warrior. In each sublist (the list of warriors from one author, the list of warriors of one type, etc.) the warriors are in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest).
The listing by date is broken into six-month periods. The complete listing is also available as one file. The listings are given in reverse chronological order: the most recent warriors appear a the top of the list. If you want opponents to try your warriors against, check out the recent warriors (although some older warriors are still very good).
The listing by author name is sorted by author's last name (or nickname). This is another good way of getting the outstanding warriors, once you get to know who is (or was) good at this game.
If you're in this list and I've made a mistake in your name, please tell me so (or if you want me to put your nickname instead, or whatever).
The listing by program name is in ASCII order. This means that the warriors whose names begin with lower-case letters are at the end (sorry). This listing is most useful if you're looking for a specific warrior, or if you want to avoid giving an un-original name to your warrior. (Warning: this is one big file.)
You can also get a sorted list of all the warriors in this page. If you have a warrior that's not in this list, please send me some mail.
This is a listing broken into 14 types of warriors. Most warriors are listed under several types, as they implement mixed strategies.
Disclaimer: First, I found it hard to define clear boundaries for the above categories. If you think they don't make sense (or I missed one or two), tell me but don't flame me. Second, categorizing all these warriors is a lot of work, and I don't have time check it really carefully. If you find a mistake, tell me so.
Look what I found in the Berkeley archives!