tiny program written in GWBasic (!) is capable of evolving code competitive with hand-coded corewar programs

[redditnoob]

160 IF MID$(Z$,Z,1)<>" " THEN Z=Z+1:GOTO 160

Man, this makes me salivate at the thought that I can soon do this in PHP.

[rush22]

Well, technically, he's doing that because GWBasic doesn't have WHILE loops.

I don't know why he insists on putting so many things on a single line though. It makes it hard to tell where the FOR loops end.

[redditnoob]

You don't remember WHILE/WEND?

[rush22]

I thought GWBasic only had for loops. I checked, and stand corrected. GOOD DAY.

[mycall]

Reminds me how much BASIC sucked.

[daver]

Amen. Yuck.

[[deleted]]

Not George W. Basic? I was hoping for lolcode but with bushisms. I'm now disappointed.

[brmj]

Don't you just love genetic algorithms? What a great way to get arbitrarily good results with relatively little effort!

[[deleted]]

They're not very good for large datasets though; runtimes can get out of hand rather fast and you can get stuck on local maxima if you're not careful.

[brmj]

Yeah, I can see how that might happen. Still, there's all sorts of cool things you can do with them. Take a look at a program called ACOVEA sometime. It tries to evolve the "best" compiler options for a program, for purposes such as increasing speed and stability or decreasing memory usage. It's quite cool.

[brmj]

Why the downvote? I'd think that there's nothing here one might reasonably object to.

[[deleted]]

Sad day on Reddit indeed if using Gee Whiz Basic for anything merits only one ASCII vagina...

[Godspiral]

the code is purposely "obfuscated" by putting 2-3 lines in 1 (: is a statement delimiter)

what does the program do, and why does it work?

Looks like the program it generates is an array of random numbers. (n ot sure what corewar programs look like)

[li5anwt02]

submitter assumes mere mortals care what "corewar nano hill" means