#corewars — Public Fediverse posts

Peter Watts refs his second novel #Maelstrom as he discusses emergence of self-replicating patterns from random strings in various computing environments but I had memories of #CoreWars floating through my head as I read it all.

From the quoted article:
We show that when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise.

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11220
#PeterWatts #scifi #science #ArtificialLife

Voyager hacking is cool but nuts! But finally, those Core-Wars skillz are coming in useful.

I should probably never again complain about having to do OS updates on PDPs and VAXen in orbital satellites.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

#NASA #Space #Voyager #Hacking #CoreWars #Satellite #Digital #DEC #VAX #VMS #PDP #OS #Updates #RetroComputing

@izaya @gudenau I'd say

mov (r1)+, (r2)+

shows the PDP-11 is CISC, but

mov -(pc), -(pc)

shows the PDP-11 is fully orthogonal. The program counter on the PDP-11 works just like a normal register for almost all instructions. This program takes the current address executed by the CPU and copy its content (e.g. the instruction itself) to the previous address, and decrement PC to that address - it's a self-replicating virus that fills the entire memory. #CoreWars