Not sure. Any suggestions for other applications to test? I guess the Tidalis demo would be a good test, as it also runs on Unity.
That would be an interesting test, yes. But I mean basically anything in general. But particularly anything that hits memory and/or temperature hard. Those tend to "find" hardware faults more than others.
His background processes were using a bit less than a gig when I had him check.
Yea, AI War starts at around 700-800MB of RAM and can easily get into the 1.1 and 1.2 GB range during play. Normally virtual memory is there so that some part of those background processes get shuffled to disk so AI War can run, but it's possible that the saturation of physical RAM is causing the machine to use bad spots it wouldn't normally get near. And it's also possible that there's something up with the virtual memory setup.
If he's able to reduce the background load, that might help. Minimum specs for the game include 1GB of RAM (available; even having 16GB isn't enough if it's all being used by something else); we probably should have updated that to 1.3GB or so as the game has grown
It's also vaguely possible in a remote sort of way that there's actually a bug in AI War or Unity or the version of Mono used by Unity, but I don't think I've seen anyone else have this particular behavior happen (ever, but certainly not on a regular basis) while running AI War.