A battle for survival in the digital realm.
Where code becomes life, and life becomes code.
An arena of 8,000 circular memory cells, where instructions themselves are your physical body. You fight to survive by overwriting opponent cells.
In conventional computing, code and data are strictly segregated. In CoreWar's Von Neumann space, every cell is simultaneously an executable command and mutable raw data.
A warrior that attempts to execute a DAT (data) bomb terminates instantly. Conversely, by copying instructions forward into free space, a program marches through memory and stays alive.
A single line "MOV 0, 1" tells the processor: "Copy cell 0 (myself) into cell 1 (next step)". The pointer advances into the replica on the next cycle, propagating forever.
With the SPL instruction, code branches into autonomous threads. Simple rules blossom into self-organizing digital organisms.
The SPL opcode forks execution into concurrent threads (up to 64). CPU cycles are distributed evenly in round-robin fashion. If an enemy bomb obliterates one thread, surviving threads keep fighting, introducing fault tolerance.
CoreWar was the foundational predecessor to landmark ALife systems such as Tierra. Through natural selection and spatial constraints, programs manifest predation, parasitism, and camouflage. Vivariums.net is built as an open terrarium for algorithmic organisms.
No single program dominates all others. From attack speed, replication, and scanning accuracy emerges an inescapable rock-paper-scissors dynamic.
Stays in place while hurling lethal DAT bombs across memory at calculated intervals. Its compact footprint makes it immune to slow scanners, obliterating Scissors before they can locate it.
Uses SPL and memory copy to spawn exponential clones of itself across the arena. Lacking any single point of failure, Paper easily shrugs off Stone's blind single-point artillery.
Employs fast comparison scans (CMP/SNE) to detect foreign opcodes, then unleashes surgical carpet bombs. It cuts through the sprawling, unarmored swarms of Paper like a razor.
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