Warrior Encyclopedia
The classic Core War strategies, rebuilt for ZoreWars and explained line by line. Every one is in the arena's Library menu and in the warriors/ folder.
How many warriors exist?
Thousands. Core War has been played since 1984, and players have published their programs to newsgroups, tournament archives and "hills" (standing tournaments) ever since. The two big public archives:
Koenigstuhl
Planar's archive
Almost all of them belong to a handful of strategy families. This page covers those families with one working example each.
About the code on this page. The archives don't say whether their warriors may be redistributed. So every warrior here is our own implementation of a classic idea, written for the ZoreWars VM and tested in it, and each card links to the original that inspired it. You can still battle the originals: Fight in the Hall of Fame (or Import… in the arena, or zorewars battle classic:thermite) fetches a warrior from its archive when you use it, and it stays in your browser. 34 of the 35 originals below load and run unchanged, including FOR loops and P-space. The exception is Frontwards, which was written for the larger '94x hill rules.
Counts checked on 24 October 2026. Koenigstuhl was last updated 23 July 2026.
Library ranking
Every warrior on this page against every other, 100 rounds per pairing. Like rock-paper-scissors, the order depends on who's in the field: add your own warrior and the table changes.
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Hall of fame
Famous warriors from forty years of Core War. Links go to the original source in the public archives; "our version" links to the warrior on this page built on the same idea.
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The most recent name is worth noticing. Arvon, credited to "Stefan Kammann & Forge-AI", topped the Koenigstuhl 94nop recursive ranking in 2026. Its strategy notes describe a quickscan whose parameters came from a data-driven coverage model, followed by a silk paper and a stone. AI-assisted warriors are already competing at the top: exactly the kind of loop the ZoreWars CLI is built for.
The warriors
Each card explains the idea, walks through the code line by line (the explanations are the comments in the source file), and shows real results from the benchmark. Watch it fight opens the warrior in the arena against a suitable opponent.
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