From news-rocq!jussieu.fr!oleane!news.maxwell.syr.edu!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!tube.news.pipex.net!pipex!not-for-mail Tue Nov 2 18:27:00 1999 Article: 10913 of rec.games.corewar Path: news-rocq!jussieu.fr!oleane!news.maxwell.syr.edu!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!tube.news.pipex.net!pipex!not-for-mail From: "Robert Macrae" Newsgroups: rec.games.corewar Subject: IMT #2 - 2.0c Oneshot Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 23:57:05 -0000 Organization: UUNET WorldCom server (post doesn't reflect views of UUNET WorldCom Lines: 58 Message-ID: <7vl9df$gvo$1@lure.pipex.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: userbr51.uk.uudial.com X-Trace: lure.pipex.net 941500655 17400 62.188.146.244 (1 Nov 1999 23:57:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@uk.uu.net NNTP-Posting-Date: 1 Nov 1999 23:57:35 GMT X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Xref: news-rocq rec.games.corewar:10913 Good contest; not much of a result for me, but very satisfying in terms of bang per word and its good to see such a large entry. Starting out, I could only think of three viable designs: DClear -- 1.0c forward clear Rosebud -- dwarf with near-100% DAT bomb coverage Oneshot -- see below! I had a go at replicators, but I could not work out how to split fast enough to avoid frequent kills from dwarves or clears _and_ kill reliably them when I over-wrote them. Other kinds of clears seemed unlikely to beat dclear. Imps did seem like a possibility, but would be terribly prone to draws in what should be a high-scoring shootout -- and anyway they lose to DClear which is already a strong contender. Dclear wrote itself (Hi Bjoern:), Bud Lite was pretty easy (Beppe:) but got beaten by DClear... and so I started thinking about DClear-killers. The most likely candidate seemed to be a forward scan and so Red Rain (Wayne:) after some juggling (and pointer leger-de-main from HSA, Paul:) was adapted to kill against any stationary length-4 opponent unless it kills me first. I suspect that results might be improved by bombing with one of Red Rain's instructions so that self bombing is less suicidal and/or mutates into a backward clear, but time ran out. It does quite well against DCLear. Its linear scan rate is 2c, so it should win roughly 2/3 of its battles against a 1c forward clear. However it is mediocre against almost anything else because it wastes time trashing bombs and trails and its clear is only 0.33c. When a typical battle lasts 20-30 cycles, even 3 wasted cycles hurts! ;redcode-94 test ;name Red Carpet ;author Robert Macrae ;assert CORESIZE==80 ;strategy Carpet-bomber variant of Red Rain. ;strategy Beat DClear, lose to dwarves... be pretty. ; Should kill any L4 opponent before I suicide? db equ (ptr-1) ptr add.ab #3, #7 scan jmz.f ptr, >ptr mov.i db,