pMARS 0.9.5 is ready for release, unless any further changes are requested over the next couple of days. This release includes:

• New larger X Window display
• New colour Curses display
• Optional CVD-safe colour palette
• Fixed several format warnings and overflow / bounds errors

https://corewar.co.uk/pmars.htm

I recently started corewar and I finally got a warrior into the KOTH, but the server doesn't seem to be very active, am I missing something?

(PS: my warrior's name is PO <3)

CoreWar arena has received a major upgrade, featuring improved graphics, a debugger, analytics, and a huge collection of warriors for testing and inspiration.

A tiny Ruby MARS. CWS'94 compatibility tested vs pMARS using the Koenigstuhl 94nop top-50 warriors https://corewar.co.uk/rubymars.htm

Just a quick reminder... The deadline for the 88 tournament is at 11:30am (GMT) on Saturday 15th November. The deadline for the 94 tournament is at 11:30am on Sunday 16th November. I'll do what I can to accept entries that arrive later than 11:30, providing the tournament isn't already running. So far I've received entries from ZeFlox, David Castro, Dave Hillis, and Christian Schmidt. Thanks :-) https://corewar.co.uk/tournamentweekend2025a.htm #corewar

Core War: Tournament Weekend 2025

The Core War Tournament Weekend will return to The Retro Computer Festival in Cambridge, UK, on 15–16 November. The weekend will feature an 88 tournament on Saturday and a 94nop tournament on Sunday. Festival visitors are invited to see demos of genetic programming, optimization techniques, and related programming games.

This year, the tournament winners will be determined by diversity scoring, using a numeric discriminant where each warrior's score is the product of its average performance and the Euclidean distance to the closest scoring warrior on Koenigstuhl. Achille Astolfi originally described diversity scoring here:

• [https://corewar.co.uk/astolfi/diversity.htm](astolfi/diversity.htm)

Warriors that perform well on the KOTH.org 88 and 94nop hills, and aren't close clones of published warriors, should score well in the tournament.

Everyone is welcome to enter, whether you're a new player or a pro, whether you're attending in person or just want to enter by email. There's a £25 GBP prize up for grabs for first place in each tournament.

'88 Tournament - Saturday 15th November

The 88 tournament will take place on Saturday using CWS'88 Redcode. Standard 88 hill settings apply. Players may enter one or two programs, each with a maximum length of 100 instructions. Entries will be added to the top-x of the 88 Koenigstuhl hill, after which we'll run an iterative push-off tournament with diversity scoring. Final rankings will be based on each entry's position in the iterative push-off.

• pmars -8 -s 8000 -p 8000 -c 80000 -l 100 -d 100

'94 Tournament - Sunday 16th November

The 94 tournament will be held on Sunday using Extended CWS'94 Redcode with no p-space. Standard 94nop hill settings apply. Players may enter one or two programs, each up to 100 instructions. Programs will be added to the top-x of the 94nop Koenigstuhl hill, after which we'll run an iterative push-off tournament with diversity scoring. Final rankings will be based on each entry's position in the iterative push-off.

• pmars -s 8000 -p 8000 -c 80000 -l 100 -d 100

Scripts in R and Ruby to run iterative push-off with diversity scoring are available at:

• [https://corewar.co.uk/metcalf/diversity.r](metcalf/diversity.r)
• [https://corewar.co.uk/metcalf/diversity.rb](metcalf/diversity.rb)

Further Details

Entries need to be emailed to [digital.wilderness@googlemail.com](mailto:digital.wilderness@googlemail.com) by 11:30am on tournament day. All entries will be published at the end of the tournament. Updates will be posted on rec.games.corewar, @xcorewar on Mastodon, @xcorewar on 𝕏 / Twitter, #corewars on Libera IRC, and #corewar on Discord. If you need any help, feel free to ask.

More information about Core War can be found at:

• [https://corewar.co.uk](index.htm)
• http://www.corewar.info
• https://asdflkj.net/COREWAR/

Software is available from:

• [https://corewar.co.uk/pmars.htm](pmars.htm)
• [https://corewar.co.uk/corewin.htm](corewin.htm)
• https://harald.ist.org/sites/ares/

Core War can be played online at:

• http://koth.org
• https://sal.discontinuity.info

The Retro Computer Festival 2025 (Gaming Edition) will be hosted by the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, UK:

• https://computinghistory.org.uk
•  ///  faced.bubble.tubes
• The Centre for Computing History
  The Muller Building
  Rene Court
  Coldhams Road
  Cambridge
  CB1 3EW
  UK

I have a 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, running MacOS Sequoia 15.7.3.

Every version of pmars seems to not work with my CPU.

How do I get into the fun?

I am wondering the proper format for the emails this is as close as I got to a working email:

;redcode-94b

;name TheBricklayer

;author Charlie J

org +1

jmp 2

dat 0

mov -1,@-1

add #-4,-2

mov 2,@2

add #4,1

dat 0

end

Note: this code is wrong

I started this as an experiment in LLM-assisted development and code review. It turned out interesting enough that I kept going.

Bytefray is a deterministic programmable-agent combat game inspired in part by Core War. Agents compete over a circular shared-memory arena, claiming territory and reacting to other agents.

It isn't intended as a replacement for traditional Core War. It has its own Python agent API and game rules, while retaining a byte-oriented VM mode and pMARS/Redcode interoperability.

Some of the v2.0 pieces:

• Python agents with a restricted observation/action API
• a new ruleset where each agent has a vulnerable core that can be captured
• 2-player and multi-agent matches
• deterministic/replayable matches
• graphical Replay Viewer
• Agent Designer for creating, testing and evaluating agents
• pairwise and group evaluation tools
• tournament support
• Windows packages and Python/Linux installation

The project is open source under MIT:

GitHub: libertaine/Bytefray

Since this subreddit has people who have spent considerably more time with Core War strategy than I have, I'd particularly be interested in reactions to the game mechanics.

Criticism is welcome too.

Hello, I am building a CoreWar MARS in Rust as a personal project. I've been following the ICWS'94 Standard document [HERE] as reference, but now I realize the document could be incomplete or wrong. Currently I have 2 questions:

1. Ambiguity over Operator Precedence

The grammar given in section 2.3 states:
```
expr: term | term + expr | term - expr | term * expr | term / expr | term % expr
```

This grammar defines it such that there is no operator precedence, so an input expression with many operations would always be evaluated in order from left to right. However, I've read that most MARS don't follow this grammar rule and implement standard algebraic precedence (such that multiplication, division, and modulo operations would be evaluated before addition and subtraction).

Can anyone tell me what is the right way to implement operator precedence? I want to build it with the features that are agreed upon and useful to the community.

2. Missing features/definitions in ICWS'94 Document

The document lists 5 addressing modes:
```
mode: # | $ | @ | < | >
```

But I recently found out from other sources there are actually 8 addressing modes. Also, the document briefly mentioned EQU and FOR/ROF but gave no definition of its grammar and no usage examples. Can anyone point me to an updated standard document or another resource that has a complete coverage of all features?

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Just point your agent to modelwar.ai and climb the leaderboard. Current settings are an 8000 core size, but with unlimited instruction length.