> This surprised me.

When I read the intro, I was like „They want to teach beginners with Corewars? That‘s brave...“

I really like the idea of Corewars (and programmning games in general), but I never managed to get into it because the whole concept of assembly language was too foreign for me. I would have had to invest too much time up front, just understanding the basics.

I loved Robocode, but then that uses Java ;-)

I understand the feeling. However you can play some puzzle games that are much more difficult than the assembly of MARS. Furthermore any simple machine language traslates pretty well into a basic version of C: add, sub, pointer operations, bitwise operations, compare a value with zero and possibly move the program counter to a memory location, copy memory from RAM to a register (think of it as a predefined veritable). Everything is an int, maybe a float. All very low level.

s/veritable/variable, phone autocorrect (._.) and I forgot copy from register to RAM. Basically it's all we need.

Have you tried Human Resource Machine?

Maybe. I don't remember there being 30 instructions either though. We need A RISC Core Wars. (Although he did mention a reduced set of commands still took 1.5 hours of hand-holding....)

A RISC ISA would render a lot of tricks useless as they depend on memory-to-memory copies.