====================================================================== (1) The complete title of the paper ====================================================================== Evolving Assembly Programs: How Games Help Microprocessor Validation ====================================================================== (2) The name, physical mailing address... ====================================================================== Fulvio Corno, fulvio.corno@polito.it Edgar Ernesto Sanchez Sanchez, edgar.sanchez@polito.it Giovanni Squillero, giovanni.squillero@polito.it Physical address for all: Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN Corso Duca Degli Abruzzi 24 10129 Torino - ITALY Home page for all: http://www.cad.polito.it/ ====================================================================== (3) The name of the corresponding author ====================================================================== Dr. Giovanni Squillero Tel: +39-011564.7092 Fax: +39-011564.7099 ====================================================================== (4) The abstract of the paper ====================================================================== Core War is a game where two or more programs, called warriors, are executed in the same memory area by a time-sharing processor. The final goal of each warrior is to crash the others by overwriting them with illegal instructions. The game was popularized by A. K. Dewdney in his column on Scientific American in mid- 1980s. In order to automatically devise strong warriors, MicroGP, a test program generation algorithm, was extended with the ability to assimilate existing code and to detect clones; furthermore, a new selection mechanism for promoting diversity independent from fitness calculations was added. The evolved warriors are the first machine-written programs ever able to become King of the Hill (champion) in all the four main international Tiny Hills. The paper shows how playing Core War may help generate effective test programs for validation and test of microprocessors. Tackling a more mundane problem, the described techniques are currently being exploited for the automatic completion and refinement of existing test programs. Preliminary experimental results are reported. ====================================================================== (5) A list containing one or more of the eight letters ====================================================================== (H) The result holds its own or wins a regulated competition involving human contestants (in the form of either live human players or human-written computer programs). [and maybe] (C) The result is equal to or better than a result that was placed into a database or archive of results maintained by an internationally recognized panel of scientific experts. ====================================================================== (6) A statement stating why the result satisfies that criteria ====================================================================== The evolved warrior called White Noise on August 2004 became the first King of the Hill (champion) ever devised by a machine on the SAL Tiny Hill, the hardest and most active competition publicly available on the net. Moreover, even if its source code was exposed on rec.games.corewar, the evolved warrior defeated more than 70 human-written challengers, remaining champion for nine months. Indeed, White Noise also entered the Tiny Hall of Fame at corewar.co.uk, the record of the warriors that have survived longest on SAL, and, in the May 2005 list, it ranks 25th. Remarkably, White Noise is also the only evolved warrior on such list. ====================================================================== (7) A full citation of the papers + Links to full text ====================================================================== F. Corno, E. Sanchez, G. Squillero, "Evolving Assembly Programs: How Games Help Microprocessor Validation", IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation and Games (unconditionally accepted, currently in press)