Awesome that RTM's dad ends up beating everyone with the unstoppable self-replicating program. Like father, like son: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Sort of like Core War: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_war

Or my favorite variant, FukYorBrane: http://esolangs.org/wiki/FukYorBrane

I remember getting a Core War emulator running on my IBM PC/XT back in the day, but I was way too young (I think about 12) or perhaps just too uncommitted to really learn how to build my own warriors or truly understand the programming language used. But the idea of programming games has always appealed to me - another one I played around with for a bit was CRobots. I never seemed to manage to find something that had a really active community.

I was into Robocode for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocode

I once started to learn core wars (a few years back) then this happened

http://www.koth.org/irc-logs/2008-06-25.txt

(Look from 11:06 to 15:42)

You asked a bunch of questions about it in IRC which were met with generous answers from a veteran player?

I fail to see your point?