Corewars Redcode Evolver (CRE) / News: Recent posts

Although I'm sure most people have already figured out that I'm not planning to continue development of CRE, I thought I would make an official announcement. As of March 8, 2008, further development of CRE is halted until further notice.

My reason for stopping development are simple: I don't have any free time. I started CRE back in high school as a hobby. Since that time, my priorities in life have changed, and I just don't have the time (or the desire) to spend the hours of time required to continue the development of a computer program that will never be anything more than a novelty.

I'm pleased to announce the release of CRE 1.2 BETA, Release 2. CRE is a program that generates programs (warriors) for the game Corewars. It does so by using a genetic algorithm.

Changes in this release include:
-A bug was fixed in the mutate_line function. When generating new opcodes, the random number generated was too big, resulting in warriors with bad opcodes.
-The option for multi-point mutations was removed and replaced with an option on the number of mutations per line.
-The source code was cleaned up some to make it easier to read. More cleanup of the source code is planned for future versions.
-In the change_settings function, the different settings now show the expected values for each parameter.
-The optimized version of Exhaust by Martin Ankerl (exhaust-ma) replaces the original version of Exhaust.

Corewars Redcode Evolver (CRE) 1.2 BETA has been released. CRE is a program to generate warriors for the game Corewars by using a genetic algorithm.

This version of CRE simplifies its use. Rarely used options have been removed, and the user interface has been improved. A new random number function was added to ensure that numbers are more random.

You can visit CRE's webpage at http://cre.sourceforge.net.

Last week, I began writing source code for CRE 2.0. The source code for CRE 2.0 is being completely rewritten. The only pieces of source code that will be carried over from CRE 1.1 are the Exhaust simulator, written by M Joonas Pihlaja, and the function for loading warriors into the simulator core.

The main goal for CRE 2.0 is to reduce the amount of hard disk usage by storing warriors in RAM. CRE 1.1 requires a huge amount of disk access, and should be run from a RAM disk because of the risk of ruining a hard drive from excessive use. My plan is for CRE 2.0 to be able to be run from a hard disk.

I'm in the early stages of planning CRE 2.0. I will be rewriting the source code for CRE from scratch. The reason for this drastic rewrite is that when I first wrote CRE, I had just been programming for about a year. In the years following CRE's first release, my programming skills have improved and my knowledge of genetic algorithms has increased. It would be faster for me to rewrite the program than to try to go through every file and make the changes that are needed.... read more

If you use CRE on a UNIX based system (Linux, *BSD, etc.) there is a bug in evolution method 2 that causes the program to hang. This issue is being researched and a fix will be released as soon as the issue is resolved.