alt Hacker NewsUsing evolution in the context of Core War is not a new idea by far, it is even referenced in the paper.
Examples here: https://corewar.co.uk/evolving.htm
The difference here is that instead of using a typical genetic algorithm written in a programming language, it uses LLM prompts to do the same thing.
I wonder if the authors tried some of the existing "evolvers" to compare to what the LLM gave out.
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That in turn makes me wonder:
Given fixed opposition, finding a warrior that performs the best is an optimization problem. Maybe, for very small core sizes like a nano core, it would be possible to find the optimum directly by SAT or SMT instead of using evolution? Or would it be impractical even for those core sizes?
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)
https://github.com/adamierymenko/nanopond
Lots of evolving bug corewar-style systems around.
I think the interesting thing with this one is they're having LLMs create evolving agents instead of blind evolution or some similar ML system.
Oh man, that's funny to see one of my grad school class projects in that list. Takes me back. :-)
From that experience: The LLM is likely to do drastically better. Most of the prior work, mine included, took a genetic algorithm approach, but an LLM is more likely to make coherent multi-instruction modifications.
It's a shame they didn't compare against some of the standard core wars benchmarks as a way to facilitate comparisons to prior work, though. Makes it hard to say that they're better for sure. https://corewar.co.uk/bench.htm