Actually, I've been referenced to this already, but I have completely missed it.

I have been messing around with Z80 processor for some time and given how it's slow and simple I had to do some really dirtry tricks to make game code efficient, and that made me thinking "hey, this has potential as a benchmark, what if I make a competition where speed of decision making is key". Since Z80 Emulators allow for precise tick control, every bot gets equal chance.

And because of Z80 simplicity I was able to go 100% deterministic route: every game has a seed and it's guaranteed that games with the same seed and players end up the same, so players can debug what happened after they've lost, etc.

There are C compilers for it, but I am also curious if somebody with enough Rust-fu just provides a binding for it, since this is technically not about C, but about machine code.

At lease there's a difference: Core War uses fictional CPU architecture, while this one uses Z80. BTW, the first GameBoy is also a Z80 device, yes?

Something to have fun with on weekend :)