Core War: Two Programs Enter, One Program Leaves

If you like Core Wars you might also be interested in Tierra, which was one of the first large scale experiment in artificial evolution. http://life.ou.edu/tierra/

This reminds me of Bot Wars friends and I used to have on IRC. I dug up the code for my bot (the champion, no one could defeat it! YC hackers can probably make an even more powerful one):

http://therobert.org/stuff/takeover_2.zip

Fully strategized IRC bot teams! I put up an IRC server and am watching them fight each other, it's really fun. Come watch with me!

irc://24.14.149.24/takeoverz

I played that a lot while in high school. It actually has a lot of interesting and beautiful aspects. Strategies evolved a lot since Dewdney's first articles. I still plan to write a blog article about them one of these days.

There is also a newsgroup, rec.games.corewar - currently apparently being flooded by an overenthusiastic newbie, but I checked a couple of days ago, and many famous old-timers where still around.

Don't call me an old fart - I am not that old.

I love this type of code on code violence. Our machine learning professor had us do several of these in college. Another cool one is Robocode, from IBM alphaworks: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/robocode

Wow, I can't believe Core Wars is making a rejuvenation...! My dad told me about this game a couple months ago (saying it's the only game he's ever played! -- old fart!)