CoreLife: Artificial Life Simulator

A few years ago when using either Lycos or the WWWW (remember those?) to search for CoreLife I came across a program with the same name. The program I discovered is an artificial life simulator written by Erik de Neve.

CoreLife supports two VCPUs:

• The CoreLife VCPU - supports 32 instructions that resemble 8086 assembly
• The Tierra VCPU - supports the 32 instructions of Thomas Ray's software

After seeding memory with a handwritten organism the simulation begins. Each organism attempts to replicate while the simulator randomly mutates instructions or causes them to fail. Thanks to the mutation the copied organism often differs slightly from the parent.

In some cases the mutation renders the child organism less effective or too damaged to replicate. In other cases the child is smaller and faster, able to out-replicate the less efficient parent.

Watching the code evolve made me wonder if I could beat evolution. I set myself a challenge: could I create the ultimate organism to out-replicate everything else and resist mutation?

Unfortunately any attempt to resist mutation quickly died out so I settled for creating the smallest self-contained replicator, just 22 instructions:

;22 Instruction Replicator
;for the Tierra Virtual CPU
nop_1
adrb
nop_0
push ax
sub_ac
divide
mov_ab
adrf
nop_1
sub_ab
inc cx
mal
nop_1
dec cx
mov_ii
ifz
ret
inc bx
inc ax
jmpb
nop_0
pop dx

• CoreLife is available on Erik de Neve's webpage and runs perfectly using DOSBox.

CoreLife: Programming in 2 Dimensions!

For a while I've been promising to take a closer look at Dennis Luehring's list of programming games to select a few for further investigation. The list contains over 1500 links in 200 categories!

The first I've chosen is CoreLife, a 2D variant of Corewar by Brent Adams. CoreLife is one of the earliest 2D programming languages, predating Befunge by a few months.

Battles take place on a 100 × 100 memory grid. The outcome of a battle isn't uniquely determined by the initial conditions as there's a random element to the game.

Unfortunately, there's very little information about CoreLife strategies. There are 13 published battle programs. Most of these launch imps or bomb the grid with protected locations. Battle programs are often surrounded by a membrane or shield of protected locations. Despite this CoreLife has the potential to support more complex programs, for example replicators.

I've set myself the challenge of writing a replicator. First I'll attempt to write something linear and if that's successful, a square replicator! Has anyone experimented with CoreLife and if so, did you create a successful program or discover anything interesting?

For more information about programming games, take a look at Steven Robbins' list of programming games or Dennis Luehring's list of programming games.