README for PyCorewar 0.2.0

PyCorewar is a fast MARS with an easy to use Python interface. It is released under The GNU General Public License, Version 2 (see the file COPYING for details).

At the moment the following features are supported:

• ICWS '88 (with multiwarrior support)
• ICWS '94 draft (without P-Space)
• most features of pMARS' parser

Updates can be found at http://corewars.jgutzeit.de/pycorewar/index.en.html For flames, comments and bug-reports send an email to jens@jgutzeit.de

The '88-MARS of PyCorewar (Corewar.Benchmarking.MARS_88) is about 125 % faster than pMARS, the '94nop-MARS (Corewar.Benchmarking.MARS_94nop) is about 50 % faster than pMARS. I hope to increase these values a little bit in further releases.

Writing PyCorewar would have been almost impossible without the help of the Core War Community. Special thanks go to

Sascha Zapf for endlessly running benchmarks and testsuites and providing lots of ideas.

Albert Ma, Nandor Sieben, Stefan Strack and Mintardjo Wangsaw for writing pMARS

M Joonas Pihlaja for writing exhaust, which made it very easy to understand the inner workings of a MARS

Martin Ankerl for writing exhaust-ma, where I have found a lot of ideas for optimizing PyCorewar.

Michal Janeczek for writing fmars, where I have found even more ideas for optimizing PyCorewar.

Paul V-Khoung for several nice chats about optimizing PyCorewar

March 28, 2006 - Jens Gutzeit