The Corewar project is the final exercice from the Algorithm branch at 42. Core War is a programming game in which several programs battle for domination in a virtual computer using a limited set of instructions. Students must build the arena, develop a champion and an interpreter to convert it into a binary. This project is relatively straight-forward but requires a complete reading of the documentation and a precise implementation.
TBD
TBD
TBD
The Corewar project does not requires the implementation of an efficient battle program: strong strategies should be kept secret for the annual championship.
Instead, our champion relies on a cheeky strategy: stealing the opponent's program as fast as possible. This is hit-or-miss: it immediately punishes a bad defense but it also loses instantly if the opponent has a proper setup. This can be compared to the Scholar mate in chess: a pure beginner destroyer. It relies on precise pre-calculated moves and is not suited for games with 3 players.
It builds two springboards to launch its process at the start of the opponent program, and uses the opponent's starting setup against it. If not countered, the opponent ID will be overwritten. An efficient defense against that strategy is to remove the setup part immediately after using it.
The Virtual Machine is the arena of the Corewar. The program runs the champions in a simulated virtual memory until a winner has been found. We used the binary provided by the subject as a reference and compared the dumps with diff: differences are purely visual.
TBD