If you've been around core war long enough, you'll remember Mark Durham's
EBS tournaments in '92, Stefan's double-elimination tournaments In '93 and
Michael Constant's no-elimination tournament in '94. Finally, email tournaments
are back.

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* Announcing: Nandor's and Stefan's Fall Core War Tournament (NSFCWT) *
***********************************************************************

The tournament is open to anyone with email. The maximum number of participants
we can handle is 36. There'll be approximately 8 rounds, one per week starting
October 13. Every round will feature a new challenge including:

        - hill-style round-robin
        - team play (two two-warrior teams)
        - white warrior battle (try to beat a known piece of code decisively)
        - programming problem (prime factoring, square root, ..)
        - round-robin with randomly fluctuating core size
        - etc., etc., (suggestions welcome)

Prizes:
        See your name prominently featured on the newsgroup, receive a trophy
        made out of 100% recyclable electrons. Seriously though, the winner
	(and possibly two runners-up) can send in their GIFs to be displayed
	in the "Core War Hall of Fame" (soon at www.stormking.com).

How to sign up:
        Sign up by sending the first round entry (see below). Rules for the
        first round are posted in the next article. Only the first 36 will
        be considered. If there's space, we will let players join for the 2nd
        round or later, but they will receive no points for the rounds they
        missed. You can drop out of the tournament at any time by sending a
        note. You can also sign up as a team with a friend or two, if you can't
        afford the time on your own.

Time table:
        There will be one round every week beginning Friday, Oct. 13. There
        might be two weeks in between rounds in case the challenge involves
        cooperative team play. The whole tournament will go on for ca. 8 rounds
        and finish before Christmas.

Results and rule posting:
        Results of a round will be posted to the rec.games.corewar newsgroup on
        the same weekend the round is played. The same post will also contain
        the rules for the following round. If you don't receive news, subscribe
        to the corewar-l mailing list
        (http://www.stormking.com/~koth/corewar-faq.html for details).
	Participants will also receive the results and rules by direct mail.

Score:
        After each round, players are ranked from highest to lowest score. The
        player with the lowest rank receives 1 point, the next higher rank 2
        points etc..  Points from each round are added to determine the overall
        winner of the tournament.

Warrior submission:
        Warriors should be sent to Stefan.Strack@vanderbilt.edu. Submission is
        due each Friday by 20:00 central time. If your submission hasn't been
        received by that time, the warrior from last week's round will be used.
        We will try to announce the rules for each round 2 weeks ahead of time,
        so you can submit warriors early if you need to.

Warrior format:
        Unless otherwise noted, all warriors should conform to the Redcode
        syntax of pMARS v0.8. This includes all ICWS'94 additions as well as
        the new P-space extensions. In addition to the ;name and ;author lines,
        your submitted warrior has to have the following tags:

                ;contact <your email address>
                ;NSFCWT Round #                 ;# is the round number

Warrior publication:
        Some time after the tournament is over, all the submitted warriors,
        including the accompanying articles will be archived and uploaded to
        the core war archive at ftp.csua.berkeley.edu. Please comment your
	warriors and use ;assert. Also indicate any EQUs that you would like
	to hide. Specialized code of the white warrior and programming
	problem rounds might be posted during the tournament.

Remember, there's a limit of 36 players, so sign up quickly. If you've ever
submitted a piece of redcode to the beginner's hill (or any hill for that
matter :-), this tournament is for you. Lots of challenges, including the
programming and white warrior problems, don't require KotH experience, so
join the fun even if you're just starting out.

Hope to hear from you soon,
	Nandor Sieben & Stefan Strack