Core War comes to iPad

Inspired by a long history of programming games going back to the early 1980's, Core War provides an arena for two competing programs to battle for supremacy.

A Core War program is coded in simple instructions based on the RedCode 88 syntax. Core War assembles each of the two programs into a memory of 8000 words, and animates their execution.

Features

• Animated execution of 2 competing programs in a shared 8000-word core
• Programs use syntax similar to RedCode 88
• Each program can have up to 512 parallel threads of execution
• Start with the provided sample programs, and create any number of your own code warriors
• Adjust execution speed to get a faster result, or more feedback on program execution
• Inspect memory with Core War's magnifying glass function

Look here for a preview of Core War in action.

Background

Programming games have a tradition that date back to the early days of computing, along the lines of "we're using these machines for work, but lets have some fun with them too!". While the idea of having competing programs battle it out for supremacy has been around for much longer, a major milestone was set when in March 1984, D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney published Core War Guidelines. Their game was introduced to the public in May 1984, in an article written by Dewdney in Scientific American.

Programming games like Core War have been implemented on a vast number of different systems, and we're pleased to continue that tradition by bringing a Core War game to iPad. For more information on the history of programming games and the individuals credited with the original ideas, the Wikipedia Article is good starting point.