cobb@utcsstat.UUCP (Ozan Yigit) (05/28/84)
Gee, I think it will be difficult to find a man page for DARWIN. The article referred in core wars article was written in 1972, which was about a re-write of the game, which really was written in 1962, on a IBM 7090. It is also clear, from the description of DARWIN, that it is probably not as exciting as core wars, although it does contain some neat ideas. The significant difference between the two games is that DARWIN uses a set of "umpire" calls for examining a piece of memory, kill an organism at a particular address and obtain some more memory, namely PROBE, KILL and CLAIM. Under DARWIN, each organism has a protected code region. The game does not use a scheduler. Instead, control is only transferred from one organism to another only when a PROBE call results in a protected area of the other organism. (sort of MEMORY ACCESS VIOLATION). The critical problem with the darwin (at the time) was the loading of the organisms into the main memory in some random fashion, to obtain a UNIQUE game. There are a long list of rules for DARWIN. I could type them in if there is enough interest across the network. Commentary: DARWIN is only significant because it uses the WHOLE system as its arena. Most of its ideas are incorporated into core-wars, except that in DARWIN, one can use any programming language for the coding of an organism. OZ (wizard of something or another) Dept. of Computer Science York University decvax!utzoo!yetti!ozan decvax!utzoo!utcsstat!cobb