In my previous blogpost I talked about Corewars and the Redcode language. But instead of playing the game, you can do a lot more with the programming language. John Metcalf posted a blog about OISC (One Instruction Set Computers). He decided to implement the RSSB algorithm, so I took on the challenge of implementing SUBLEQ, another single instruction set computer.

And here is the result:

Corewar is a game from the 1980’s, played between computer programs written in Redcode, a language similar to assembly. The programmers design their battle programs to remove opponents from the memory of the MARS virtual computer by any means possible.

Some of the simpler techniques include blindly overwriting memory, searching for the opponent or spawning off new processes. These are commonly known as stone, scissors, paper after the popular playground game. Stone usually wins against scissors, scissors normally defeat paper, and paper mostly beats stone.

Here’s an example of a typical Corewar program: