_PUSH OFF_ A midweek review of Corewar June 16, 1993 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. The Standings: # %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age 1 44/ 35/ 21 Winter Werewolf 3 W. Mintardjo 153 51 2 44/ 41/ 14 Iron Gate 1.01 Wayne Sheppard 148 561 3 35/ 24/ 42 Night Crawler Wayne Sheppard 146 733 4 44/ 44/ 12 Fire Storm v1.1 W. Mintardjo 144 372 5 37/ 30/ 34 FlyPaper 3.0 J.Layland 143 157 6 44/ 44/ 12 Dragon Spear c w blue 143 835 7 44/ 46/ 9 Agony 5.2 Stefan Strack 142 360 8 44/ 47/ 10 Backstabber Anders Ivner 141 284 9 32/ 25/ 43 Sphinx v2.8 W. Mintardjo 140 1731 10 32/ 24/ 43 Incrimination v1.0 Brant D. Thomsen 140 137 11 42/ 45/ 12 Impurge Fredrik Ohrstrom 139 57 12 31/ 25/ 44 Snake Wayne Sheppard 137 493 13 33/ 30/ 37 ImpsAreMyFriend 1.1 J.Layland 136 222 14 42/ 47/ 11 cproba nandor sieben 136 75 15 39/ 42/ 19 Distance v6.3 Brant D. Thomsen 135 227 16 38/ 42/ 19 Emerald 5.1000 P.Kline 135 33 17 30/ 25/ 45 Imprimis 6 P.Kline 135 1133 18 33/ 38/ 30 Passport P.Kline 128 1 19 36/ 48/ 16 Impurge 2.0 Fredrik Ohrstrom 124 3 20 27/ 36/ 37 Sparrowhawk Michael Constant 118 8 21 25/ 37/ 38 Deck of Many Things c w blue 112 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- II. The Basics: -Core War Archives are available via anonymous FTP at soda.berkeley.edu in pub/corewar... -FAQ for this newsgroup is available via anonymous FTP at rtfm.mit.edu as pub/usenet/news.answers/games/corewar-faq.z ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- III. The Scoop: Take a bow, Dan Nabutovsky, winner of the summer tournament. Dan successfully outguessed (or out-lucked :-) every opponent, cruising through the tourney without a lost match. And thanks to Stefan for providing some fun and entertainment the last few weeks. Credit Albert Ma with making the event possible (from Stefan's viewpoint) - his Mercury emulator is clocked at over a thousand battles an hour! W. Mintardjo continues to work on improving Sphinx, just in case Sphinx v2.8 _ever_ gets knocked off: 3 36/ 24/ 40 Sphinx v5.0 W. Mintardjo 147 1 19 27/ 30/ 43 Sphinx v2.8 W. Mintardjo 124 1640 This week may mark the passing of +0 Stormbringer's record age - 1778 as Sphinx v2.8 is already over 1700 as of this writing. And WM's version 3 of Winter Werewolf seems locked in first or second place. Good work! Was that a 'boot' you added WM? :-) CW Blue's 'Dragon Spear' is creeping up on age 1000, might go over this week. On the other hand, Imprimis 6 has been sulking around the bottom of the hill, going under 130 points pretty regularly. Better watch out if it gets knocked off :-( In this week's "Guess we'll never know" department: A challenger has arrived on the hill! Vital statistics: Program "test" (length 48) by "Michael Constant" (contact address "constant@stat.Berkeley.EDU"): ;strategy i'll tell you the strategy if it works F. Ohrstrom continues to prove my theory that the secret is in the name - his 'test -b' program was in first place, but 'Impurge' can't get up that high. And W. Sheppard's 'TEST' scored 155 points, but none of his named warriors are that good. Maybe The Hint should be to give your program a name other than 'test' (or 'sub-type' :-). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IV. The Outlook: 1 38/ 21/ 41 TEST Wayne Sheppard 155 1 1 45/ 43/ 12 test - b Fredrik Ohrstrom 148 1 1 46/ 35/ 19 Winter Werewolf 3 W. Mintardjo 157 1 2 36/ 26/ 39 sub-type-b+r c w blue 146 1 2 42/ 38/ 19 Elizabeth Bathory c w blue 147 1 3 36/ 24/ 40 Sphinx v5.0 W. Mintardjo 147 1 3 42/ 38/ 20 sub-type-cmp c w blue 146 1 3 43/ 38/ 19 Winter Werewolf 2 W. Mintardjo 147 1 4 44/ 41/ 15 Twilight Pits 8 W. Mintardjo 146 1 4 45/ 43/ 12 test - a Fredrik Ohrstrom 147 1 6 33/ 24/ 44 sub-type-os c w blue 142 1 6 37/ 34/ 29 FlyPaper 3.01 J.Layland 139 1 6 44/ 42/ 14 Zipp c w blue 147 1 7 33/ 25/ 41 FlyPaper 4.1 J.Layland 141 1 7 45/ 44/ 11 Impurge Fredrik Ohrstrom 145 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- V. The Quick Look: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI. The Hint: Vampires! Bloodsucking Leeches. Snakes! Brrr. Let's talk pit-trappers. Basically a pit-trapper works by making your processes jump into a rapid-splitting, core-clearing, self-destroying, nasty bit of code. You are forced to split many many processes, thereby robbing your healthy processes of time. You are forced to erase the core, destroying any surviving components. And you finally erase the pit itself, killing your remaining processes. Vampire strategy goes back to one of the standard battle programs, 'Vampire', and was used successfully by Eugene P. Lilitko's Cowboy program to win the 1988 tournament. Here's a modern version of Vampire: inc dat #3364,#-3364 fang jmp trap,4 start spl 0 add inc,fang mov fang,@fang jmp -2 trap mov 10,<-10 spl -1 jmp -2 All vampires eventually cause their own processes to jump into the trap to speed up the core clear (and to guarantee one). Vampire's strengths include small size, rapid bombing (with fangs), and complete core-clear. Their most important feature, however is enslaving the opponent's processes to do their dirty work. Variations include substituting the 'trap' line for 'inc', booting the code to separate the bomber from the trap, putting the fang in different locations, multiple spl's to more rapidly overpower the opponent, and 'gates' to stop imps (see Sucker 5). Areas to explore: What else can the pit do? Using multiple fang-bombers to better deal with stones. Evolving the fang-bomber into a repeating core-clear. Multi-pass fang-bombing to overcome self-splitting paper (NotePaper) Currently the Hill is hostile to vampires like Sucker 5 and Twilight Pits, but Snake seems pretty successful. Next week we'll discuss anti-vamp and new SUPER anti-vamp (if I can get it to work :-). Meanwhile, maybe someone out there has some thoughts on vampires? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VII. The End: Paul Kline pk6811s@acad.drake.edu