We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I learned about core wars in high school, but the teachers never found a good spot to shove it in the curriculum, so ultimately I never bothered to play.

0x10c featured a programmable 16-bit architecture called DCPU. The game’s canceled, but the architecture did pick up some fans.

There's also lots of 'genetic' warriors, where people use programs to evolve the warriors through battles-- not quite pokemon, but more, "make a change, and if it gives you a better win rate, keep it, otherwise discard it".

I don’t know what people do for this game, but usually you have a number of individuals in the population per generation, and thousands of generations. Then you let it cook for a while while they duke it out (or whatever else you use to evaluate “fitness”) and mutate/mate. This is because a single win doesn’t mean a whole lot if you’re looking for something that does well in general.

Genetic algorithms are good for certain kinds of problems; basically, it’s something like a shotgun approach to playing hot-and-cold as opposed to a more reasoned one. You’d use it where non-intuitive leaps might prove fruitful (even though they probably wouldn’t most of the time), but wild-ass guessing would not. It is not the sort of thing that runs in real time, so it’s not a technique you see in the field of video games too often... but sometimes it is relevant.