So Ollie posted a tweet linking to the below tweet — which is itself very cool — but reading about the game sparked memory of CoreWars, something I haven’t thought about in 20+ years.

In case you’re unaware, it’s basically “Robot Wars in Cyberspace”: Core Wars is a perfect game for the pentester-inclined: two players inject programs (in a custom assembly language) into a memory space, and then the programs try to kill each other. It has a very (very) long history.

There are various engines around for playing the game but I have no idea of the state of the art; digging up some resources for the curious, I can at least offer:

• Wikipedia Page
• History Page
• Simulators
• Old home page for KOTH / King Of The Hill, mostly useful as a resource for links to tutorials and old stuff from the ’90s / the era where I was messing with it (NB: page is HTTP-only)

It’s amazing (and probably relevant) that the rec.games.corewar USENET group appears to be one of the key resources for the corewar community.

haha i just released a board game to teach my daughter riscv assembly https://t.co/uvUyIhMmK6 i had forgotten how fun it is, tbh if people start treating programs as 'jump to some address and execute' rather than 'npm install react' things would be better

— jackdoe (@punkxorg) September 21, 2023

https://www.corewars.org/docs/dummies.html