Digital Red Queen: Adversarial Program Evolution in Core War with LLMs

Summary

Survival of the Fittest Code. In the game Core War, assembly-like programs called “warriors” fight for control of a virtual computer. Warriors may employ sophisticated strategies including targeted self-replication, data bombing, and massive multithreading, in order to crash other programs, and dominate the machine. Top: We visualize battles between assembly programs (“warriors”) discovered by our Digital Red Queen (DRQ) algorithm. Each DRQ round introduces one additional warrior into the multi-agent simulation. Bottom: With more rounds, the LLM-driven evolution discovers increasingly robust strategies. By simulating these adversarial dynamics, we observe emergent behaviors that mirror biological evolution, where agents must constantly adapt simply to survive against ever-changing threats. Furthermore, as Core War is a Turing-complete environment where code and data share the same address space, this process leads to some very chaotic self-modifying code dynamics. Summary Core War is a competitive programming game introduced in 1984, in which battle programs called warriors fight for dominance inside a virtual computer. To compete, developers write their code in Redcode, a specialized assembly language. In this work, we explore what happens when large language models (LLMs) drive an adversarial evolutionary arms race in this domain, where programs continuously adapt to defeat a growing history of opponents rather than a static benchmark. We find that this dynamic adversarial process leads to the emergence of increasingly general strategies and reveals an intriguing form of convergent evolution, where different code implementations settle into similar high-performing behaviors. Ultimately, this work positions Core War as a sandbox for studying “Red Queen” dynamics in artificial systems, offering a safe controlled environment for analyzing how AI agents might evolve in real-world adversarial settings such as cybersecurity. For further details, please read our technica...