Youngsters may not know about Core War, a competitive game for agents that debuted in 1984, and it's predecessor Darwin from 1961.

The difference in compute scale between the Darwin winning program (44 machine instructions) and an agent today that calls into an LLM is rather mind boggling.

https://corewar.co.uk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(programming_game)