RoboWar

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RoboWar is an open source game in which you program robots to battle each other. The syntax of the language in which the robots are programmed is a relatively simple one, based largely on IF, THEN, and simply-defined variables. Each variable attributes more to the robot's skill, and its ability to survive.

25 RoboWar tournaments were held in the past, with all contestants available on the web site. While RoboWar was originally released as a closed source freeware game for the Apple Macintosh platform, the source code has since been released and implementations are now also available for Microsoft Windows.

The RoboWar programming language itself is based on Reverse Polish Notation and is similar in structure to FORTH.

[edit] Programming Features

RoboWar for the Macintosh was notable among the genre of autonomous robot programming games for the powerful programming model it exposed to the gamer. By the early 90's, RoboWar included an integrated debugger that permitted stepping through code and setting breakpoints. Later editions of the RoboTalk language used by the robots (a cognate of the HyperTalk language for Apple's HyperCard) included support for interrupts as well.