Codeguru Extreme is a competition between teams of programmers for a tough and brutal survival arena where only one software code, the most sophisticated and tough, wins. All the programs are written in sef language (8086 assembly) and the battlefield is a shared and predefined area in memory
Anyone who has read newspapers or watched television in recent months knows how sophisticated computer software can be made into a versatile and insidious weapon. But anyone who has followed the digital gladiator arena called "Kodagoro Extreme" in recent years was certainly not surprised by the machinations of the computer worm Stuxnet.
Codeguru Extreme is a competition between teams of programmers for a tough and brutal survival arena where only one software code, the most sophisticated and tough, wins. All the programs are written in sef language (8086 assembly) and the battlefield is a shared and predefined area of memory. All the programs run in the same memory area, using the game engine developed by Danny Leshem and try to take control of it while eliminating competitors by damaging their code and avoiding damage.
The sixth competition was held in December 2010 at the Ort Singalovsky Educational Complex in Tel Aviv. Dozens of teenagers participated in the competition in 9 teams. David Levit Gurevich, 20, from Kiryat Bialik won first place, and won a cash prize of NIS 10,000 from the General Security Service. General and a scholarship for undergraduate studies at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.
Soon the 12th round of the more "relaxed" version of the competition - Kodagoro - will take place. Both competitions are supported by parties in industry (IBM Israel), in academia (Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya), in the education system (Ort Network, Ministry of Education), in the defense system (General Security Service, ICT Division of the IDF) and by associations such as Startupsides and the 8200 Alumni Association.
But the game engine allows not only to conduct virtual bloody battles but also to try and create aesthetic works that, with their perfection, will perhaps allow to compete with conventional works of art. Dr. Oded Margalit from IBM's research laboratories in Haifa and the organizers of the competition and his colleagues decided to run drawing software in the arena and see if as a result of the struggle a new and interesting work would be created.
Unlike Kodgoro Extreme, the programs are not malicious, that is, they do not try to harm each other on purpose, but similar to evolutionary systems, the competition for the limited resources (they all run in the same area of memory) results in only the fittest surviving, and only through random changes ("mutations") that have worked for their benefit.
The figure on the right shows the normal outputs of the programs, and on the left is the scene of the struggle between them after a few generations. Embarrassingly, one can see that the logo of the IBM company has disappeared from this virtual world, while other software suffered severe blows. In particular, the transformation of the drawing of the white circles, whose creation code was based on the Bresenham algorithm, whose use is accepted in computer graphics, is particularly remarkable.
Credit: Courtesy of Oded Margalit
The developers emphasize that the simplicity of the code, and the fact that it is a machine language, allow the processes to exist, both in the Codeguru Extreme competition and in the new development. Such random errors in a more sophisticated language would likely cause a crash. All software tools are free to use, and the developers invite programming enthusiasts to use them to explore the new visual universe. They hope that the study of this competitive universe will also bring new insights into our biological Darwinian world, in which random mutations also play an important evolutionary role.
