Intro

Hello and welcome to my CoreWar Homepage!
If you don't know what CoreWar is, you should have a look at some beginner guides which can be found on the King of The Hill - Server.

Here you can find some information about evolving corewar-warriors in general, and the Sourcecode of yace which is an modified version of the evolver ga_war.c (many thanks to Jason Boer). It uses exhaust, which is an corewarsimulator under the GPL (many thanks to M Joonas Pihlaja).

yace - yet another corewar evolver

Finally I decided to call my evolver yace, yet another corewar evolver. If you want to use yace I wouldn't download the beta. It will have more features, but will also be more buggy. If you want help debugging send me an email if you encouter a problem, or better: try to correct it :-)

Latest Release: yace_0-01.zip
Latest Beta: yace_0-02_beta.zip

Terry Newton has written a description of yace and some batch-files for easier use of it.

At the moment it is a modified version of ga_war.c. Watch out the history:

• yace 0.1 Date: 2000-08-20
  
  • The random number generator creats numbers which are more likely to be somewhere around coresize/2, coresize/3, coresize/4 and so on. With this piece of code the evolver is much more likely to produce papers.
  • when 2 warriors fight each other every fight is done twice, once with swapped starting position. With this implementation two warriors which are exactly the same will also get exactly the same score. This is expecially usefull for very staring-point dependet warriors as d-clears.
  • there is no need for Pmars any more: I integrated exhaust, which is under the GPL, easy to use and fast. This modification gets very usefull when evolving for the tiny hill, because there is no overhead by starting an external program.

• evolving with a testset: every warrior has to fight against some warriors, the benchmark; the selection is based on this result.

• To make it faster, I want to get rid of the file-based evolution and want to evolve directly in memory.

• I think of a completely new structure for yace: it should be much easier writing additional routines for it, so that other people who are interrested in evolving could write there own crossover/mutator/whatever - plugins. At the moment I don't know how to realize this, so please send me an Email if you have an idea!

Evolving corewar

Here you can find some information about evolving corewar in general. There have been many attemps on evolving corewars, but up to now purely evolved warriors are still much bader than handwritten ones. When I write this I know of 5 different evolvers: Sys4b, ga_war.c, RedMaker, RedRace any yace. There are also some corewar-evolution related papers, a good starting point is KoTH.

All these evolver face two big problems:

• testing a warrior is slow: for the typical hill you have 80000 iterations per warrior for only one fight, and you need more than 100 fights to get a precise result.

• The search-space is very large: One line of code consist of:

  oppcode	DAT, MOV, ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV, MOD, JMP, JMZ, JMN, DJN, SPL, CMP, SEQ, SNE, SLT, NOP
  mode	A, B, AB, BA, X, F, I
  modifier 1	#, $, *, @, {, <, }, >
  address 1	0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... 7998, 7999
  modifier 2	#, $, *, @, {, <, }, >
  address 2	0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... 7998, 7999

  This are

  17 x 7 x 8 x 8000 x 8 x 8000 = 487.424.000.000

  possible different lines of codes, and a warrior may contain up to 100 lines:

  487.424.000.000 * 100 = 48.742.400.000.000 = 4.87424 * 10^13

  This is a huge number. (All warriors smaller than 100 lines are already included, because the core is initially filled with DAT's, which is also a regular instruction)

written by Martin Ankerl August 2000