Issue 81 11 April, 2002
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Core Warrior is a newsletter promoting the game of corewar. Emphasis is placed
on the most active hills - currently the '94 draft hill, the beginner hill and
the '94 no-pspace hill. Coverage will follow wherever the action is. If you
haven't a clue what I'm talking about then check out these five-star Internet
locals for more information:
FAQs are available from:
http://www.koth.org/corewar-faq.html
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~anton/cw/corewar-faq.html
Web pages are at:
http://www.koth.org/ ;KOTH
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~pizza/koth ;Pizza
http://para.inria.fr/~doligez/corewar ;Planar
http://www.ociw.edu/~birk/corewar ;C.Birk
Newbies should check the above pages for the FAQs, language specification,
guides, and tutorials. Post questions to rec.games.corewar. All new players
are infinitely welcome!
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Greetings...
This issue is a little slimmer than usual, due to the Pizza hills currently
being inactive. Contents include the results from round 1 of the tournament
and Purifier, Lukasz Grabun's stone/paper.
-- John Metcalf
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Current Status of the KOTH.ORG '94 No Pspace Hill:
# %W/ %L/ %T Name Author Score Age
1 40/ 24/ 36 Inky Ian Oversby 155.2 467
2 37/ 21/ 42 Purifier Lukasz Grabun 154.1 24
3 45/ 36/ 19 Hazy Lazy ... again Steve Gunnell 153.3 23
4 36/ 20/ 44 nPaper II Paul-V Khuong 152.0 988
5 45/ 39/ 17 Vanquisher Lukasz Grabun 150.3 79
6 36/ 22/ 42 Son of Vain Oversby/Pihlaja 149.5 577
7 38/ 28/ 34 Quicksilver Michal Janeczek 148.3 750
8 37/ 27/ 36 Uninvited John Metcalf 146.2 670
9 36/ 27/ 37 Olivia Ben Ford 145.4 716
10 35/ 24/ 41 Hopper Phooey 145.2 114
11 43/ 41/ 16 Behemot Michal Janeczek 144.1 811
12 37/ 33/ 30 Blacken Ian Oversby 141.9 1235
13 42/ 43/ 16 Deep Freeze X Lukasz Grabun 141.1 177
14 37/ 34/ 29 Keyser Soze Anton Marsden 141.0 689
15 35/ 29/ 36 Revival Fire P.Kline 140.4 456
16 43/ 45/ 13 Test C Phooey 140.4 115
17 40/ 40/ 21 Blue test 3 Lukasz Grabun 139.5 9
18 43/ 46/ 11 G3-b David Moore 139.5 258
19 39/ 50/ 11 Aoshi Test B 15 Steve Gunnell 126.7 2
20 38/ 54/ 9 Hazy Test A 25 Steve Gunnell 121.8 1
161 challenges bring some effective young warriors to the hill. Those which
departed include Qtest (394), Hazy Lazy (killed at age 309) He Scans Alone x
(170) and paper/stone test (129).
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The '94 No Pspace Hall of Fame: * indicates the warrior is still active.
Pos Name Author Age Strategy
1 Blacken Ian Oversby 1235 * Q^2 -> Stone/imp
2 nPaper II Paul-V Khuong 988 * MiniQ^3 -> Paper
3 Behemot Michal Janeczek 811 * MiniQ^3 -> Bomber
4 Eraser II Ken Espiritu 781 Scanner
5 Quicksilver Michal Janeczek 750 * Q^4 -> Stone/imp
6 Olivia Ben Ford 716 * Q^4 -> Stone/imp
7 Keyser Soze Anton Marsden 689 *
8 Uninvited John Metcalf 670 * MiniQ^3 -> Stone/imp
9 Jinx Christian Schmidt 662 Scanner
10 Jade Ben Ford 600 Q^4 -> Stone/imp
11 Son of Vain Oversby/Pihlaja 577 * Qscan -> Stone/imp
12 Inky Ian Oversby 467 *
13 The Phantom Menace Anton Marsden 465
14 Revival Fire P.Kline 456 * Bomber
15 Boys are Back in Town Philip Kendall 441 Scanner
= Zooom... John Metcalf 441 Scanner
17 G2-b David Moore 413 Twoshot
18 Qtest Christian Schmidt 394
19 Stalker P.Kline 393 Scanner
20 Vain Ian Oversby 330 Q^2 -> Stone/imp
21 Omnibus John Metcalf 327 Q^2 -> Stone/imp
22 Win! David Moore 322 Scanner
23 Hazy Lazy... Steve Gunnell 309 Scanner
24 Recovery Ian Oversby 280 MiniQ^2 -> Paper/stone
25 The Fugitive David Moore 274 MiniQ^2 -> Paper/imp
One new entry here, Hazy Lazy, which just crept into the HoF before Steve
killed it off to make way for the next generation. Qtest ends it's days
at the respectable age of 394.
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Spring / Summer 2002 Corewar Tournament - Round 1 Results:
In all 15 authors submitted a total of 27 warriors for the initial round of
the tournament. Of these, 8 were evolved and the remaining 19 hand-coded.
The hand-written warriors were represented by 4 oneshots, 4 scanners, 3
papers, 3 clears, 3 stones, 1 p-spacer and 1 anti-oneshot.
The warriors were played in a round robin tournament taking just under 8
minutes to complete.
Without further ado, the results. Congratulations to all taking part:
# %Won Lost Tied Name Author Score %
1 58.2 30.3 11.5 WingShot T Ben Ford 186.18 100.0
2 56.4 26.6 17.0 Evolving Threat Dave Hillis 186.13 99.9
3 54.8 35.9 9.3 t766-- Michal Janeczek 173.71 93.3
4 48.0 26.0 26.0 Venom Ben Ford 169.98 91.3
5 52.3 35.0 12.8 s774++ Michal Janeczek 169.57 91.1
6 52.4 35.3 12.3 Dettol Test 487 Steve Gunnell 169.45 91.0
7 51.3 35.6 13.2 Tiny Talon Robert Macrae 166.94 89.7
8 49.6 34.9 15.5 Evolver 1100 x 500 Martin Ankerl 164.26 88.2
9 35.4 13.9 50.6 Rasp Leonardo H. Liporati 156.94 84.3
10 46.3 41.2 12.5 Tiny Freeze Lukasz Grabun 151.46 81.3
11 44.4 38.4 17.3 Imp .X-ing Dave Hillis 150.31 80.7
12 37.5 26.7 35.8 Stolen1 Robert Macrae 148.30 79.7
13 45.6 43.9 10.4 clear skies Simon Wainwright 147.29 79.1
14 44.9 46.4 8.7 Djinn Test Tiny 326 Steve Gunnell 143.32 77.0
15 40.8 40.9 18.4 Squirm13 Philip Thorne 140.61 75.5
16 38.6 41.5 19.8 Mighty Mouse Winston Featherly-Bean 135.72 72.9
17 41.0 49.4 9.6 10686804-18881-101719649 mushroommaker 132.71 71.3
18 40.1 48.9 11.0 The Wasp Lukasz Grabun 131.27 70.5
19 37.9 49.1 13.0 rickety old redcode Simon Wainwright 126.80 68.1
20 37.6 52.5 9.9 Szczur Arek Paterek 122.81 66.0
21 36.5 51.4 12.1 50324-62579-1017504560 mushroommaker 121.53 65.3
22 33.9 52.3 13.8 Euthin Philip Thorne 115.63 62.1
23 34.0 52.8 13.3 31133-61360-1017455494 Paul Drake 115.24 61.9
24 31.4 57.3 11.3 Primordial Clear Winston Featherly-Bean 105.41 56.6
25 16.6 32.9 50.5 Rubber Snake Compudemon 100.38 53.9
26 25.6 61.1 13.3 9101-61316-1017454713 Paul Drake 90.16 48.4
27 19.1 50.2 30.7 Snow Castle Compudemon 88.05 47.3
WingShot T takes first place for Ben Ford, a fraction of a point ahead of
Dave Hillis's Evolving Threat. WingShot is a .8c BiShot style scanner.
Evolving Threat is an evolved paper which has been evolved further against
warriors from Koenigstuhl's tiny hill. Next is t766-- by Michal Janeczek,
a backwards scanning oneshot.
A little further down, another 5 authors make the top 10. First we have
Steve Gunnell's oneshot, Dettol Test, followed by a scanner, Tiny Talon,
from Robert Macrae. A warrior evolved by Martin Ankerl is next.
After this comes Leonardo Liporati's Rasp which is the original tiny qscan
-> paper. This is followed by Tiny Freeze, Lukasz Grabun's scanner.
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Extra Extra - Purifier by Lukasz Grabun
A carefully optimized paper/stone warrior is capable of scoring well
against many classes of opponent. Purifier is one such warrior.
The stone used is a modified Spooky Wench. A number of step and duration
pairs were generated and the pair which performed best overall against a
selection of scanners was chosen.
The paper was optimized using a method similar to that which is described
in CW75. Firstly, the bombing line was replaced with a harmless nop. This
allowed some good replication steps to be found without the results being
affected by how well a particular position of the strip bombing interacts
with the paper steps. A large number of different steps were benchmarked
against a test set of published warriors.
The most effective replication steps from the first stage were chosen. The
bombing line was then reactivated and many different bombing distances were
tested against the same set of warriors. The distance which appeared most
effective was chosen.
While putting the stone and paper together, careful experimentation was
required to determine effective process allocation. For an aggressive
stone/paper it is generally necessary for the stone to receive more
processes in the early cycles of a battle, and Purifier is no exception to
this observation.
Finally, the best offset between the paper's initial location in core and
the stone's location needed to be chosen. Once again a large number of
offsets were generated by a simple C program and tested against the warrior
suite. From these results, 20 were selected for one final test, against
KOTH's no-pspace hill.
Below is the code for Purifier, utilizing a qscan derived from the qscan
found in Quicksilver:
;redcode-94nop
;name Purifier
;author Lukasz Grabun
;strategy Mini Q^4 -> Stone/Paper
;assert CORESIZE==8000
org qGo
pDst0 equ 3009
pDst1 equ 2794
pDst2 equ 2930
pHit equ 7235
sStep equ 598
sTime equ 1698
sOff equ 7770
pGo spl 1 , }qC
qTab2 spl 1 , }qD
spl 1 , }qE
pSilk0 spl @0 , {pDst0
mov }pSilk0 , >pSilk0
pSilk1 spl @0 , <pDst1
mov }pSilk1 , >pSilk1
pMov mov pBmb , >pHit
mov {pSilk1 , <pSilk2
pSilk2 jmp @0 , >pDst2
pBmb dat >5334 , >2667
for 10
dat 0 , 0
rof
sSpl spl #0 , #0
sMov mov sBmb , @sDjn
sInc add #sStep , sDjn
sDjn djn.f sMov , {sInc-(sTime*sStep)
sBmb dat >4 , >1
bBoot mov sSpl , sOff-6-CURLINE
spl 2 , 0
sDest spl 2 , sOff-CURLINE
sSrc spl 1 , sBmb+1
mov <sSrc , <sDest
djn @bBoot , #5
jmp pGo , 0
qX equ 4684
qA equ 5020
qB equ 2367
qC equ 6689
qD equ 4036
qE equ 1383
qF equ 7673
qStep equ 7
qTime equ 16
qOff equ 87
for 39
dat 0 , 0
rof
qBomb dat {qOff , qF
dat {qOff , qA
qTab1 dat {qOff , qB
qGo sne qPtr+qX*qE , qPtr+qX*qE+qE
seq <qTab2+1 , qPtr+qX*(qE-1)+(qE-1)
jmp qDec , }qDec+2
sne qPtr+qX*qF , qPtr+qX*qF+qD
seq <qBomb , qPtr+qX*(qF-1)+qD
jmp qDec , }qDec
sne qPtr+qX*qA , qPtr+qX*qA+qD
seq <qTab1-1 , qPtr+qX*(qA-1)+qD
djn.a qDec , {qDec
sne qPtr+qX*qB , qPtr+qX*qB+qD
seq <qTab1 , qPtr+qX*(qB-1)+qD
djn.a qDec , *0
sne qPtr+qX*qC , qPtr+qX*qC+qC
seq <qTab2-1 , qPtr+qX*(qC-1)+(qC-1)
jmp qDec , {qDec+2
sne qPtr+qX*qD , qPtr+qX*qD+qD
jmz.f bBoot , <qTab2
qDec mul.b *2 , qPtr
qSkip sne *qTab1 , @qPtr
add.b qTab2 , qPtr
qLoop mov qBomb , @qPtr
qPtr mov qBomb , }qX
sub #qStep , @qSkip
djn qLoop , #qTime
djn.f bBoot , #0
end
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Questions? Concerns? Comments? Complaints? Mail them to people who care.
Beppe Bezzi <giuseppe.bezzi@galactica.it>, Philip Kendall <pak21@cam.ac.uk>,
Anton Marsden <anton@paradise.net.nz>, John Metcalf <grumpy3039@hotmail.com>
and Christian Schmidt <schmidt@mail.uni-mainz.de>
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