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.
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.
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.