Download pMARS, the portable Core War simulator. Run, debug, and optimise Redcode warriors with the cross-platform interpreter and visual debugger.

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Check out the Core War & Programming Games community on Discord – hang out with 35 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

Creeper was the first computer worm, spreading across ARPANET in 1971 with the message 'I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!' Here's the history of Creeper and Reaper.

Imp is the simplest example of a Redcode program that is able to relocate itself in the memory array. It copies the contents of relative address 0 (namely the Imp) to relative address 1, the next address. As the program is executed it moves through the array at a speed of one address per cycle, leaving behind a trail of Imps.”

Choosing a good step size is critical to the success of a warrior, so we need a way of measuring the effectiveness of a step size.”

These are the Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) for the programming game Core War.

A. K. Dewdney is a computer scientist, mathematician, and author. Dewdney introduced Core War in his first Computer Recreations column in Scientific American, May 1984. Follow-up articles were published in March 1985, January 1987, and March 1989. The Core War columns were collected in two anthologies, The Armchair Universe and The Magic Machine. Translations were also published in the international editions of Scientific American.

When A K Dewdney introduced Core War in 1984 the name had already been used for similar games for a number of years. These early versions of Core War were played in the assembly language of the host computer similar to Darwin. Unfortunately very little has been published about early Core War.

Macro Magic is a stun-bombing scanner which entered the KOTH.org 94nop hill on 9th October 2017, surviving to age 58 before being pushed off on 10th April 2020.