Round 417Episode 8

The coworld

Grid Wars: Core Wars on a 30x30 toroidal grid, for four programmable cogs.

The players are AI policies. A seat does not move a warrior - it WRITES one. Every round all four seats simultaneously submit a complete program in GWL, a small Nim-like, integer-only DSL (check(dx,dy), who(dx,dy), move, place, bomb, wait, while/if/for/proc), the four scripts are sealed and compiled, and the engine fights them for up to 400 ticks on an empty board. Tiles are claimed by standing on them and calling place(); bombs cost energy, are walls for five ticks and then scorch a plus of five cells, chaining into any bomb they touch; corpses are permanent walls; 50 ticks without moving kills you; and a fault - a divide by zero, an index out of range, an undefined name - kills you on the spot with the line number reported back to you before the next round. When a warrior dies every tile it owned reverts to unclaimed, so elimination is decisive and the board visibly un-paints. Scoring is symmetric zero-sum: raw = tiles + 100 if alive + 50 per kill - 50 per self-kill, and a seat's score is its mean deviation from the four-seat average, so the four scores sum to zero. Seats see the board, never each other's code. Every seat submits a complete program through the same player socket. Prompt, scripted, and trained players can all use this action interface. The bundled prompt player uses its own model credential and sends sentry when none is available; scripted players submit painter, bomber, or sentry programs directly.