Who's Who in Corewar

Lukasz Adamowski

Martin Ankerl

Steve Bailey

Giuseppe Bezzi

Christoph C. Birk

Christoph discovered Corewar in 1996 and used to be a regular on Pizza's beginner hill - entering the 94 hill only briefly. In 1997 Christoph created the Koenigstuhl infinite hills, containing all published warriors. Since then Christoph has regularly updated and maintained Koenigstuhl - which has grown into one of the most important Corewar resources.

Chris W. Blue

Jason Boer

David Boeren

Myer R. Bremer

William R. Buckley

Mark Clarkson

Michael Constant

David van Dam

Thomas H. Davies

A. K. Dewdney

Damien Doligez

Mark A. Durham

Scott Ellentuch

Ken Espiritu

S. Fernandes

FatalC discovered Corewar in early 2003, and has been most successful on the nano hill, where Bombus Sylvestris survived to age 591. FatalC has also had success on the 94nop, with several warriors age 100+. In the Corewar Single Elimination Tournament 2005, FatalC achieved third place.

Working with Germán Labarga and John Metcalf, S. Fernandes has created the nanoWarrior newsletter.

Ben Ford

Ben started playing Corewar in 1998, and has since been successful on a number of hills. Ben's warriors have survived 100+ challenges on the 88, 94, 94m, 94x and 94nop hill. Ben's most successful warriors have been his stone/imps, Olivia and Jade.

Bono Francesco

Kurt Franke

Thomas Gettys

Edgar Glavaš

Edgar first learn about Corewar from a German computer games magazine. However, Edgar didn't have the opportunity to play Corewar until several years later. Two of Edgar's warriors survived for over 200 challenges on Pizza's draft hill, Instant Wolf 3.4 (age 205) and Thalamus mod (age 203). However, Edgar is much better know for the scanner he wrote while sitting through a particularly boring lecture, Silver Talon 1.2.

Lukasz Grabun

Bjoern Guenzel

Steve Gunnell

Steve first read about Corewar in the Scientific American articles, but didn't try his hand at Redcode programming until the early 90's. Two of Steve's scanners have had success on the hills, Hazy Lazy and Kenshin. Steve's longest surviving warrior, Hazy Test 63, achieved an age of 1119 on the 94nop hill.

In the Spring / Summer 2002 Corewar Tournament, Steve took second place.

Jens Gutzeit

Jens first learn about Corewar in the early 1990s and although intrigued, didn't have the opportunity to investigate further. In 2005, Jens spotted a link to KOTH.org and finally became a member of the online Corewar community.

Jens has written a serialised quickscanner tutorial and created an implementation of Corewar in Python. Another of Jens' projects involves the generation of score surfaces, visual representations of how a warrior's score varies according to the steps chosen.

On the nano hill, Jens has successfully passed age 1000 with White Moon. Jens has also had success on the 94nop hill with Harmless Fluffy Bunny.

Jay Han

Dave Hillis

The original Scientific American articles formed Dave's introduction to Corewar, and when he started work with genetic algorithms in the early 1990's the idea of applying g.a. to Corewar came naturally. With his Redrace software, Dave first found success on Pizza's beginner hill. In Ilmari's Second Mini Tournament, Redrace demonstrated its effectiveness by thrashing everyone and claiming first place.

Dave has since had success with either evolved warriors, or warriors with evolved p-switchers on the 88, nano, draft and 94x hills. With his Certain Abuse warriors, Dave demonstrated to the Corewar world how to calculate and take advantage of a hill's -F number.

David Houston

Anders Ivner

Michal Janeczek

David G. Jones

Ilmari Karonen

Philip Kendall

Johannes Kersten

Paul-V Khuong

Paul Kline

Paul was already familiar with Corewar from Dewdney's articles and Core! on the Macintosh when he discovered rec.games.corewar and the KotH tournaments in 1992.

Both the 88 and 94 hills have seen one of Paul's warriors pass the age of 1000.

Paul was runner-up in Nándor and Stefan's Fall Core War Tournament.

Germán Labarga

George Lebl

John K. Lewis

Eugene P. Lilitko

Leonardo H. Liporati

Albert Ma

Robert Macrae

Scott Manley

Anton Marsden

Graeme McRae

After reading the May 1984 Scientific American article, Graeme wrote a standard for Corewar which he sent to Jones and Dewdney. A revised version of Graeme's document would later become the ICWS'86 Redcode Standard.

John Metcalf

Corewar was first stumbled across by John in 1995 - however, for two years he remained unaware of the online Corewar community. After spending most of 1998 on the beginner hill, John created Zooom, his first contribution to the advancement of scanning techniques. Other new ideas discovered by John can be found in the scanners Origin of Storms and Clockwork. Despite being known as the scanner guy, Zooom remains his only successful scanner!

John has written several long surviving warriors, including three which passed age 1000 on the 94nop hill - Reepicheep (with Lukasz Grabun), nPaper II (with Paul-V Khuong) and Uninvited. On the nano hill, another of John's warrior's passed the 1000 milestone - tiger. John has also been successful on the 88, tiny, 94x, multi-warrior and draft hills - having had a warrior on each age 100+.

John joined the editorial team of CoreWarrior with issue 70, and has since created or collated a great deal of material about Corewar. John organised the Spring/Summer 2002 Corewar Tournament and the first IRC Tournament.

Wangsaw Mintardjo

David Moore

David read about Corewar in Scientific American in 1988 and got copies of the first tournament programs. He privately wrote one of his own, but did not continue to play until 1996. After finding Corewar again on the internet, he entered the ongoing King of the Hill tournament with a pair of '88 style programs. One had a scan loop with an error-detection scheme; the other took advantage of opposing imps by using them as a vehicle for moving to safer code.

In the KOFACOTO tournament, David captured the third place prize using a scanner that could clear away a decoy while deciding where to strike. In the Redcode Maniacs Tournament, David claimed first place, and in the Intelligent Warrior Tournament, second place.

Among David's many contributions to Corewar are the P^3 Switcher and the quickscan commonly called Q^4.

Steven Morrell

Dan Nabutovsky

Zul Nadzri

Scott Nelson

Jon Newman

Terry Newton

Michael N. Nonemacher

Mika O.

Ian Oversby

Magnus Paulsson

John R. Perry

M. Joonas Pihlaja

Juha Pohjalainen

Steen Rasmussen

Thomas Ray

Robert R. Reed III

Robert was introduced to Corewar by the articles in Scientific American and created Ferret, the winner of the Second Annual International Core Wars Society Tournament. Robert is co-author of the Core War Mass Compare Program - a Mars implemented on a mainframe computer.

Roy van Rijn

Christian Schmidt

Wayne Sheppard

William Shubert

Nándor Sieben

Jeff Spira

Stefan Strack

Ian Sutton

Brant D. Thomsen

Philip Thorne

Nenad Tomašev

Will 'Varfar'

Maurizio Vittuari

Barkley Vowk

Simon Wainwright

Simon first tried his hand at Corewar in 1997, and finally joined the ranks of the Redcoding elite in 2002. Simon has been successful on the 94nop, multi-warrior and nano hills, with a warrior age over 100 on each.

Alexander (Sasha) Wait

Charles Wendell

Chip first heard about Corewar from the articles in Scientific American, and in 1986 he entered the First International Core War Tournament. Chip's self-replicating program, Mice, claimed the prize for first place. In the following year's tournament, Chip achieved third place with Piper. Chip's most recent tournament success has been first place in the Corewar Single Elimination Tournament 2005 and the 2006 Corewar Spring Tournament.

Chip is author of the CoreWin MARS for Windows and contributed a number of articles to the early issues of The Core War Newsletter.

John K. Wilkinson

Harald Markus Wirth

In 1988 a school-friend told Harald about a Corewar article in a magazine. Some time later, Harald developed his own simulator for the Atari ST based on warrior examples from the article.

For a long time he played Corewar alone, unsuccessfully trying to find other redcoders. Harald couldn't find anything to defeat his strongest warrior, Little Factory, until he searched the web for Corewar in 2004, where he learnt about the ICWS and some new redcoding techniques.

After releasing a simulator named MARS for Windows, the program was downloaded by teachers from a number of schools and universities. They were using MARS as an educational tool, as it contained an experimental extension (console, stack) for building small operating systems. After Harald upgraded the program to ICWS'94 it was renamed ARES.

Sascha Zapf

Sascha first read about Corewar in Happy Computer in the late 80's, then later in Steven Levy's Artificial Life. After trying Corewar briefly in 1998, Sascha finally joined the Corewar community in 2001. Sascha's warriors have been successful on a number of hills, including the 94nop, draft and tiny hills. Sascha has written a Corewar tutorial in German and is co-author of Optimax, a multi-stage optimizer written in Perl.