
Robot Odyssey (1984) - sea6ear
https://www.robotodyssey.online/
======
Waterluvian
When I was 8-11 I played this game obsessively. I did a fourth grade project
on logic gates because of it. Probably contributed to why I ended it up in
robotics.

It was an incredibly hard game. I got to the last level on my own but didn't
unlock the fourth robot, leading to a soft lock. I also used unoptimal
solutions for maybe half the levels. Ie. Using a random bouncer and patience
to traverse the ventilation shafts.

Some of my fondest memories of growing up with an Apple II.

------
dang
A thread from 2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17421175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17421175)

2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7118649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7118649)

~~~
DonHopkins
Dag nabbit dang, you beat me to it! That 2018 thread about Robot Odyssey
Online had a link to a Slate article mentioned some stuff about Alan Kay's
high regard for Robot Odyssey, who somebody quoted, then he posted a
correction to the article himself, and I posted some other discussions about
it with him as well (and some links to other papers about related stuff by
Chaim Gingold, Kurt Schmucker, and Dan Ingalls). Robot Odyssey was brilliant
and waaaay before its time, and as Alan Kay said: Warren Robinette is a very
special designer! He was the creator of one of the first known easter eggs in
a video game: Atari Adventure, released in 1979 on the Atari 2600.

(I happen to be wearing my Factorio t-shirt right now! That's another
robophilic game too, notoriously known as "programmer crack".)

>nlawalker on June 29, 2018 [-]

>From the Slate article: "When Teri Perl described the project to legendary
computer scientist Alan Kay, he said, “You’re wasting your time. It can’t be
done.” That is, the basic idea was simply too complex to run on an Apple home
computer. When Robot Odyssey shipped, the company gave Wallace a plaque that
said, “It can’t be done. —Alan Kay.”"

>That's an awesome story.

>alankay1 on June 29, 2018 [-]

>An "awesome story" that isn't the way it happened (as with too many "awesome
stories"). See the comment I made (posted below by niawalker). To summarize
here, I said I love "Rocky's Boots", and I love the basic idea of "Robot
Odyssey", but for end-users, using simple logic gates to program multiple
robots in a cooperative strategy game blows up too much complexity for very
little utility. A much better way to do this would be to make a "next Logo"
that would allow game players to make the AI brains needed by the robots. So
what I actually said, is that doing it the way you are doing it will wind up
with a game that is not successful or very playable.

>Just why they misunderstood what I said is a bit of a mystery, because I
spelled out what could be really good for the game (and way ahead of what
other games were doing). And of course it would work on an Apple II and other
8 bit micros (Logo ran nicely on them, etc.)

>From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Just
curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore

>Hi SJ --

>Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean
separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the
behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be
independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for those who
would like to try their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming
systems.

>This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 82-84, it
was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games into frameworks
for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down
turn towards the end of 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion
to morph into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results there
helped with the later Etoys design.

>Cheers,

>Alan

>From: Alan Kay Subject: Robot Odyssey

>I actually argued with him [Will Wright] and Maxis for not making SimCity
very educational. E.g. the kids can't open the hood to see the assumptions
made by SimCity (crime can be countered by more police stations) and try other
assumptions (raise standard of living to counter crime) etc. I've never
thought of it as a particularly good design for educational purposes.

>However, I have exactly the opposite opinion of Robot Odyssey, which I
thought was a brilliant concept when the TLC people brought it to me at Atari
in the early 80s. (Rocky's Boots is pretty much my all time favorite for a
great game that really teaches and also has a terrific intro to itself done in
itself, etc. Warren Robinette is a very special designer.).

>The big problem with Robot Odyssey (as I tried to explain to them) was that
the circuits-programming didn't scale to the game. They really needed to move
to something like an object-oriented event-driven Logo with symbolic scripting
to allow the kids to really get into the wonderful possibilities for
strategies and tactics. (BTW, Etoys is kind of an OO event-driven Logo (not an
accident), and the next version of it has as a goal to be able to do Robot
Odyssey in a reasonable way. This got delayed because of funding problems but
we now have funding and are really going to do it this year. Want to help
design and build it?)

>From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky
+ Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

>Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed
for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of
Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007
TED talk.

>I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your
SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".

>Cheers

>Alan

>\------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's
-- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking
Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather
than expressions).

>From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky +
Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

>I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the
subsequent versions!

>But there’s a great demo on youtube!

[https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s](https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s)

>That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the
bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow
roads and eat traffic!

>I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching
Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown
undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of
Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first
class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take
bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is
what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like
he nailed it! ;)

>Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago.

>-Don

>Squeak-dev:

[http://squeak-
dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...](http://squeak-
dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoys-alice-and-tile-programming)

>Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago

>Folks,

>I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It also uses
tile programming like Etoys.Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history
of Tile Programming? TIA,

>Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of
Pernambuco Brazil

>Alan Kay 6 years ago

>This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM
"Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was
basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple
marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also,
a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really
excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the
system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium
project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to
make programs in Mike's very powerful system.

>The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive
environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small
projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys
ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would
work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really
good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the
ease of use turned out to be real virtues.

>We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of
outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff
Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie
it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile
scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and
maybe better).

>Cheers,

>Alan

Warren Robinett:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Robinett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Robinett)

Rocky's Boots:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots)

Robot Odyssey:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey)

Here's The Programming Game You Never Asked For:

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/heres-the-programming-game-
you...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/heres-the-programming-game-you-never-
asked-for/)

The Hardest Computer Game of All Time: It was called Robot Odyssey, it took me
13 years to finish it, and it sealed my fate as a programmer.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/01/rob...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/01/robot_odyssey_the_hardest_computer_game_of_all_time.html)

Chaim Gingold's Gadget Background Survey:

[http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...](http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20\(2017\)%20Gadget%20\(1\)%20Survey.pdf)

A Taxonomy of Simulation Software:

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf)

The Fabrik Programming Environment:

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/Fabrik%20PE%20paper.pdf](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/Fabrik%20PE%20paper.pdf)

~~~
jhbadger
I get what Kay was getting at (using a Logo-like language rather than
circuits), but that would have been a very different game. The point of Robot
Odyssey (and Rocky's Boots) was to teach digital logic, not programming.

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smacktoward
When I was a kid, this game was an incredibly effective teaching tool! What it
taught me was that I was a dumb dumb dummy dumb-head who would never be able
to comprehend how electronics worked.

Not sure that was the lesson its developers were aiming for. But if so, job
well done :-D

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ddingus
This game is really cool. Played it on Apple 2 originally.

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ape4
Does anyone else find the ".online" TLD slightly redundant.

~~~
tastythrowaway
Yes it is a bit redundant.

