Core War

The Canadian mathematician A. K. Dewdney (author of "The Planiverse") first introduced Core War in a series of Scientific American articles starting in 1984.

Core War was inspired by a story I heard some years ago about a mischievous programmer at a large corporate research laboratory I shall designate X. The programmer wrote an assembly-language program called Creeper that would duplicate itself every time it was run. It could also spread from one computer to another in the network of the X corporation. The program had no function other than to perpetuate itself. Before long there were so many copies of Creeper that more useful programs and data were being crowded out. The growing infestation was not brought under control until someone thought of fighting fire with fire. A second self-duplicating program called Reaper was written. Its purpose was to destroy copies of Creeper until it could find no more and then to destroy itself. Reaper did its job, and things were soon back to normal at the X lab.

In this game, computer programs (called "Warriors") compete in a virtual arena for digital supremacy. Warriors are written in an Assembly dialect called "Redcode".

Wikipedia article

This is a Python implementation of the MARS (Memory Array Redcode Simulator).

usage: graphics.py [-h] [--rounds [ROUNDS]] [--paused] [--size [CORESIZE]]
                   [--cycles [CYCLES]] [--processes [MAXPROCESSES]]
                   [--length [MAXLENGTH]] [--distance [MINDISTANCE]]
                   WARRIOR [WARRIOR ...]

MARS (Memory Array Redcode Simulator)

positional arguments:
  WARRIOR               Warrior redcode filename

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --rounds [ROUNDS], -r [ROUNDS]
                        Rounds to play
  --paused              Start each round paused
  --size [CORESIZE], -s [CORESIZE]
                        The core size
  --cycles [CYCLES], -c [CYCLES]
                        Cycles until tie
  --processes [MAXPROCESSES], -p [MAXPROCESSES]
                        Max processes
  --length [MAXLENGTH], -l [MAXLENGTH]
                        Max warrior length
  --distance [MINDISTANCE], -d [MINDISTANCE]
                        Minimum warrior distance