Evolving Warriors for the Nano Core

The paper describes the attempt to cultivate programs to climb the nano hill, a contest with exceptionally tight parameters of the game called corewar. An existing tool, called μGP, has been exploited. Two genetic operators were added to tackle the peculiarities of the objective. The generated programs compared favorably with others, either manually written or evolved. μGP autonomously reproduced the same structure of the current champion of the competition, and devised a sharp self-modifying program exploiting a completely new strategy.