I am so thoroughly surprised nobody mentioned this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

A couple of people in my high school along with me were hooked to CW. I remember those days with fondness that cannot be replicated.

I used to play a bit of ATRobots which is a similar thing except you program them in a "Robot Assembly" language. Lots of fun and taught the basics of ASM coding.

I've been thinking for a while about a more complex form of this sort of game. The basic idea would be that your robot (and the robots of your opponents) is sent off to a distant planet where they have to compete for resources to make new versions of themselves. Each robot would be a Linux virtual machine (xen or something) communicating with the virtual hardware via a device driver so you'd get plenty of computing power to play with compared to any previous versions of these sort of games. Could be quite a lot of fun to play.

> I've been thinking for a while about a more complex form of this sort of game.

The game like this already exists, it's called Colobot: http://www.ceebot.com/colobot/index-e.php

Just like you said - distant planet, searching for resources, replicating and building new robots... The differences are that they fight aliens instead of competing with each other, and there's actually a player, who writes program, but can also perform some actions.

And they are not full-size virtual PCs, they can be programmed in some sort of C++-like language.

Nice game, I love it, too bad they seem to stop developing.

That looks pretty cool, thanks for pointing it out.

It's certainly got a lot of what I had in mind although I think it would be more fun to make it a little more advanced. I can imagine it being aimed at more experienced programmers with the operunity to do all sorts of cool stuff like computer vision.

It's tough even to get on the hill, but someone has just gone top. I've removed email addresses.

    Program Name     Score  W / L / T  Age
    ================ ===== =========== ===
  1 dani               687 229/ 21/  0   1
  2 medusa2            675 225/ 25/  0  37
  3 penfold            657 219/ 31/  0 110
  4 noddy              639 213/ 37/  0 109
  5 stingray10         624 208/ 42/  0 113
  6 stingray2          612 204/ 46/  0 175
  7 stingray3          609 203/ 47/  0 116
  8 stingray           600 200/ 50/  0 218
  9 finiculo           579 193/ 57/  0  75
 10 wilma              571 190/ 59/  1 394
 11 evader             546 182/ 68/  0 216
 12 edgar              526 175/ 74/  1 642
 13 wotcha             521 172/ 73/  5 161
 14 quaver             507 169/ 81/  0 256
 15 tommy              479 158/ 87/  5 823
 16 fox-014            477 159/ 91/  0 716
 17 ths7h5             444 148/102/  0 939
 18 radar              441 147/103/  0  24
 19 polarbear          438 146/104/  0 736
 20 wobble             417 139/111/  0 441
 21 girosculo          405 134/113/  3 185
 22 v3                 381 127/123/  0 771
 23 whiper++           369 123/127/  0 686
 24 jelly              339 113/137/  0 439
 25 mi5                333 111/139/  0 614
 26 snaylle-11         332 108/134/  8 307
 27 pipes              322 107/142/  1 474
 28 crbot              317 105/143/  2 970
 29 megatron           316 105/144/  1  14
 30 v                  308  98/138/ 14 382
 31 ratchet            303 101/149/  0  55
 32 razor              291  97/153/  0 376
 32 minim              291  97/153/  0 259
 34 whiper_v2          289  96/153/  1 887
 35 phoenix1           252  84/166/  0 340
 36 wolfhound2         249  83/167/  0 448
 37 duelo              246  80/164/  6 186
 38 5150               244  81/168/  1 776
 39 phoenix            240  80/170/  0 345
 40 kamikaze           237  79/171/  0 901
 41 pugna              229  74/169/  7 362
 42 wrobot             223  74/175/  1 332
 43 testy              221  73/175/  2 471
 44 goodness1          220  73/176/  1 330
 45 noob_out_2         218  72/176/  2 336
 46 zquare             215  69/173/  8 348
 47 robo_basic-03      213  71/179/  0 368
 48 vugluskr           212  62/162/ 26 238
 49 losango3           106  35/214/  1   2
 50 losango             97  32/217/  1   4

Something very similar to this called Robocode has been around for some time. The language is Java though:

http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

When recruiting I've thought of saying that anyone who can get on the hill will get a job, but I've realised that fitting in with the team is critical in our line of work, perhaps in all lines of work. Some of the programmers who work for me simply don't care about this kind of competition.

I'm still on the hill, though, and that earns me some technical respect.

We used the IBM Alphaworks Code Invaders project for our first year Java class. Most of the students were delighted to see their code translated into on screen "movement". It is a Java project, http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/codeinvaders

Why doesn't they use javascript, or something that could be safely run in browser? Then they could make a simulator and editor all in the browser.

From the title on the webpage, it looks like it was last updated in 1998. In 1998, using Javascript probably wasn't quite as appealing as it would be today.

Here is the original:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots