🚀 go-pugleaf

vwulpen@cs.kuleuven.ac.be (Henk Van Wulpen) writes:

>The only problem with it is that it is incredibly slow, especially when
>lots of processes are SPLit off. I believe it is because it was written
>in Prolog, and therefore handles linked lists (the process-queues) in a
>very inefficient way. Actually, I already got an error message (from the
>program) saying that a system error occured. I think it is because the
>program ran out of memory trying to create a new item in the queue.
>Possibly the program doesn't deallocate the space of killed processes.
>The same problem occurs with KotH for PC. As long as the number of rounds
>played is reasonably low and there aren't many SPLs, the program runs ok.
>But with too many rounds or process-creation, the program halts saying that
>it ran out of memory creating a new thread. Since increasing the number of
>rounds should have no effect on the use of memory, I guess that also here the
>problem is that memory isn't freed upon removal of items in the queue.
>Just my opinions though. Any comments of the authors ???

I'll second that. I suffer from the choice of painstakingly loading my
programs into Corewars pro, and having to wait for 20 - 30 minutes for a
result - and that's on a 486 - or setting the koth process limit to 600,
which makes some of the spl 0 killing routines I'm attempting to design
inaccurate. What's more, the debugging facilities of Corewars pro are
completely brill, so having to wait for 5 minutes in order to use them
to fine-tune code (or to find that *invisible* bug thats mysteriously 
fouling up your groundbreaking new 200%xC scanner+replicator+bomber+imp)
is nail-shreddingly frustrating (well, actually, that's exaggerating a
bit. I usually just nip off for a cup of tea). Are there any *fast* PC
redcode processors with debugging facilities? 

	Talking of frustration, whenever I try to perfect my 200%xC
scanner+etc (see above), it moves through various incarnations until
it's perfect, at which stage I usually realise that it's actually just
Emerald (or Nomuckingabout or Imprimis or whatever) with a couple of
numbers changed. All my wholly original codes get completly gubbed by
the "state of the net" ones (why didn't *I* think of impire :-(). In the
true style of most research, I'm therefore limiting my search for
novelty to one (1) original line in any new redcode. With this
groundbreaking new design methodology, I've just sent my latest and
greatest offering to koth (it's called SlowWorm, 'cause it's slow, and
it keeps getting trodden on), with the objective of breaching that
psychological 80 points barrier, which should put it on the hill in
around 35th position...
	Watch me scale those (largely) unconquered heights!

	Si.
	xxx
-- 
S.A.Hovell,Dept. Electrical Engineering,University of Edinburgh,U.K.
(+31) 650-5655	 			          (Juggler@ed.ac.uk) 
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