If you like Core Wars you might also be interested in Tierra, which was one of the first large scale experiment in artificial evolution. http://life.ou.edu/tierra/
This reminds me of Bot Wars friends and I used to have on IRC. I dug up the code for my bot (the champion, no one could defeat it! YC hackers can probably make an even more powerful one):
I played that a lot while in high school. It actually has a lot of interesting and beautiful aspects. Strategies evolved a lot since Dewdney's first articles. I still plan to write a blog article about them one of these days.
There is also a newsgroup, rec.games.corewar - currently apparently being flooded by an overenthusiastic newbie, but I checked a couple of days ago, and many famous old-timers where still around.
Maybe not, but may I introduce you the the 'Reply' button with which you may reply to your child's post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153520) thus created 'threaded' conversations which are easier for us to follow.
BTW How old are you? There are some old farts here and middle farts like me.
I love this type of code on code violence. Our machine learning professor had us do several of these in college. Another cool one is Robocode, from IBM alphaworks: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/robocode
Another post pointed me at the Netflix prize http://www.netflixprize.com/ the other day. Got me to thinking what other programming contests one could make money from. Bit of a long shot, but then a start up can be too.
Wow, I can't believe Core Wars is making a rejuvenation...! My dad told me about this game a couple months ago (saying it's the only game he's ever played! -- old fart!)
