
Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online - PeterMikhailov
https://www.robotodyssey.online/
======
mcmatterson
When I was in grades ~4-8 I was placed in my school's special education
stream, which really just amounted to a day a week of totally unstructured
play in an incredibly well kitted out classroom (at the high school across the
road, no less). There was a group of us that spent more or less every
available second in that classroom playing this game on the Apple II, sharing
secrets and strategies through the (surprisingly long) game. I credit a large
part of who I am to today to it.

As a grown up I've watched video walkthroughs of it numerous times with my
daughter, and have been meaning to figure out a way to actually play it with
her. This.... is amazing.

Goodbye, Friday!

------
th0ma5
Multiple tens of hours of amazing YouTube content surrounding the effort and
all of the spiffy things going on with Emscripten and such.

Having only briefly heard of the game when I was younger it is amazing to go
through it and just how in depth it is. Had I seen this as a kid I would've
freaked.

~~~
th0ma5
Also important to note this installs nicely as a mobile app and works
completely offline!

------
codinghorror
oh my goooosh this is amazing. See: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/heres-the-
programming-game-you...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/heres-the-programming-
game-you-never-asked-for/) and specifically
[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)

~~~
nlawalker
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.

~~~
nlawalker
After posting that, I ran into this, which I feel obligated to post: the most
recent comment on the article, apparently from Alan Kay, 6/16/2017 (the
article was published 01/2014).

 _" A few corrections. (I was Chief Scientist of Atari at the time.) I told
the TLC people that this was the greatest game concept that I'd ever seen (and
still think so). I had loved Rocky's Boots and was really excited when Ann
showed me the ideas for Robot Odyssey.

What I told her -- and it's clear she misunderstood -- was that scaling up the
Rocky's Boots approach missed the point of "robots" and "computers" (meaning
that robots should have a "no ceiling" range of being "really capable") and
that programming was invented for computers for a reason.

I didn't say it couldn't be done -- I said it wouldn't work well enough for
most potential users and players (and I believe that the sign they made was
"Alan Kay says this won't work" (and if you think about it, it really didn't
given what TLC was trying to do):

(a) I was very sure that the UI ideas they had wouldn't scale gracefully, and

(b) I was very sure that scaling logic up would quickly change the "bang per
effort" ratio for the worse.

What I tried to get TLC to understand was that using some higher level
language e.g. "nicer Logo" for programming the robot brains would
revolutionize game design and playing, and would make Robot Odyssey a big hit.

After all these years I still think this is a wonderful concept, and is still
waiting for the right designers and builders to marry the concept with the
resources needed to make it great to use."_

~~~
DonHopkins
We were discussing Robot Odyssey and SimCity a while back:

\----

[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/139](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/139)

Discussion with Alan Kay about Robot Odyssey

One of Alan Kay's favorite games is Robot Odyssey! I wrote to him:

From: Don Hopkins Subject: Robot Odyssey

One thing I've always wanted to do is a re-make of Robot Odyssey, with the
full power of a real programming language underneath it, and lots of cool toys
for the robots to play with! That was such a powerful concept for a game!

-Don

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?)

\----

[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/134](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/134)

Alan Kay's ideas about SimCity for OLPC

I just received this exciting email from Alan Kay. I totally agree with the
direction he wants to take SimCity for the OLPC!

-Don

From: Alan Kay To: Don Hopkins Date: 11/9/2007 6:14 PM Subject: SimCity for
OLPC

Hi Don --

I'm writing to applaud you for your plans to reimplement SimCity for children
on the OLPC.

My main complaint about this game has always been the rigidity, and sometimes
stupidity, of its assumptions (counter crime with more police stations) and
the opaqueness of its mechanism (children can't find out what its actual
assumptions are, see what they look like, or change them to try other systems
dynamics).

So I have used SimCity as an example of an anti-ed environment despite all the
awards it has won. It's kind of an air-guitar environment.

In the past, I tried to get Maxis to take the actual (great) educational
possibilities more seriously, but to no avail.

Going to Python can help a few areas of this, but a better abstraction for the
heart of Sim-City would be a way to show its rules/heuristics in a readable
and writable form. Both of these could be stylized to put them in the child's
own thinking and doing world. For example, just the simple route of making a
drag and drop scripting interface for Etoys allows children to make very
readable and writeable scripts and helps the children concentrate on what they
are trying to do. A carefully designed object system (that is filtered fro
children) can expose the environment so they can really think about it.

I'm not at all suggesting that Etoys be used here, but I am suggesting that
some deep design be done to come up with a "behavior modification interface"
that allows real creativity on the part of the children. So it is much more
than stringing black boxes together or having to deal with fragile
procedurals.

I sense that you have some interests in making SimCity really a microworld for
children's learning and exploration from reading your webpage.

Children in 4th - 6th grade can do a lot here if they are given a good UI and
tools. So, we could think of part of this project as a "pre-Python" UI.

Scalability and non-scalability of ideas are interesting. Rocky's Boots is
still one of the best ever games that provide profound learning experiences.
The extension of this to Robot Odyssey didn't work because the logic and wires
programming didn't scale well enough -- the bang per effort dropped off
precipitously. I was Chief Scientist at Atari at that time (Warren Robbinet
worked for me) and I worked with TLC to try to get them to realize that
something like Logo, or even better, a rule-based robot programming system,
was needed. The failure of Robot Odyssey really pained me because I thought
that the concept of this game was one of the best ever (still is). But it just
needed a much better notion of how the children were going to program the
robots. I think the same goes for SimCity.

Cheers,

Alan

\----

[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/140](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/140)

Discussion with Alan Kay about Visual Programming

[...]

SimCity is similar but more pernicious. It is a black box of "soft somewhat
arbitrary knowledge" that the children can't look at, question or change. For
example, SC gets the players to discover that the way to counter rising crime
is to put in more police stations. Most anthropologists, sociologists,
psychologists, and economists would disagree violently. Alternate assumptions
can't be tried, etc.

Both of these packages have won many "educational awards" from the pop
culture, but in many ways they are anti-real-education because they miss what
modern knowledge and thinking and epistemology are all about. This is why
being "above threshold" and really understanding what this means is the deep
key to making modern curricula and computer environments that will really help
children lift themselves.

\----

[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-March/001829.ht...](http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-March/001829.html)

[sugar] Ideas about SimCity gui, turtle graphics, and cellular automata

Instead of (or in addition to) using the mouse to paint with a palette of
editing tools like Photoshop, the interface could be based on agents like logo
turtles that represent the user on the map, which carry around SimCity editing
tools that they can draw with. When you throw in a visual programming
language, it leads the way to a Robot-Odyssey-esque version of SimCity!

[...]

Redesigning the SimCity user interface for the OLPC Don Hopkins

    
    
        Visual Programming
    

[...]

    
    
          Logo Turtles (as a generalization of the monster, tornado,
          helicopter, etc)
    
            Implement programmable logo turtles as agents that can move
            around on the map, sense it, and edit it. 
    
    	Like Robot Odyssey agents, so you can go "inside" an agent,
    	and travel around with it, operate its controls, read its
    	sensors, and automate its behavior by wiring up visual programs
    	with logic and math and nested "ic chip" components.
    
    	Plug in graphics to represent the agent: use classic logo
    	turtle and SimCity sprites, but also allow kids to plug in
    	their own.
    	  SimCity sprites have 8 rotations. 
    	  SVG or Cairo drawings can be rotated continuously.
    
            Re-implement the classic SimCity agents like the monster,
            tornado, helicopter, train, etc in terms of logo turtles, that
            kids can drive around, learn to use, open up and modify (by
            turning internal tuning knobs, or even rewiring).
    
    	Let kids reprogram the agents to do all kinds of other stuff.
    
    	Mobile robots, that you can double click to open up into
    	Robot-Odyssey-esque visual program editors.
    
    	Agents have local cellular-automata-like sensors to read
    	information about the current and surrounding tiles.
    
    	KidSim / Cocoa / StageCraft Creator let kids define visual
    	cellular automata rules by example, based on tile patterns and
    	rules. Show it a pattern that you want to match by selecting
    	an instance of that pattern in the world, then abstract it
    	with wildcards if necessary, then demonstrate the result you
    	want it to change the cell to in the next generation.
    
    	Sense high level information about zones and overlays, so the
    	agents can base their behavior on any aspect of the world
    	model.
    
    	  Support an extensible model by allowing users to add more
    	  layers.
    
    	    Add layers with arbitrary names and data types at
    	    different resolutions:
    
    	      byte, int, float, n-dimensional vector, color, boolean
    	      mask, musical note, dict, parametric field (i.e. perlin
    	      noise or other mathematical function) at each cell, etc.
    
    	Edit the world. 
    
    	  All SimCity editing tools (including colored pens that draw
    	  on overlays) should be available to the agent.
    
    	  Enable users to plug in their own editing tools, that they
    	  can use themselves with the mouse, keyboard or game
    	  controller, or program agents to use to edit the map under
    	  program control.
    
          Robot Odyssey
    
            Build your own universal programmable editing tool.
    	Roll your own von Neuman Universal Constructor. 
    	Smart robots you program to perform special purpose editing tasks. 
    
    	The "Painter" picture editing program had a way of recording
    	and playing back high level editing commands, relative to the
    	current cursor position.
    
    	Remixing. Journaling. Programming by demonstration or example.
    	You could use a tape recorder to record a bunch of SimCity
    	editing commands that you act out (or you can just select them
    	from the journal), then you can play those tapes back with
    	relative coordinates, so they apply relative to where the
    	agent currently is on the map. You can copy and paste and cut
    	and splice any editing commands into tapes that you can use to
    	program the robot to play back in arbitrary sequences. 
    
    	Program an urban sprawl development-bot to lay out entire
    	residential subdivisions, complete with zones, roads, parks and
    	wires. Then program a luddite roomba-bot that sucks them all
    	up and plants trees in their place.
    
    	This becomes really fun when we let players plug in their own
    	programmed zones for the robot to lay out, and layers of data
    	to control the robot's behavior, out of which they can program
    	their own cellular automata rules and games (like KidSim /
    	Cocoa / StageCraft Creator).

~~~
Flenser
The page
[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/140](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/140)
links to
[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/taxonomy.pdf](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/taxonomy.pdf)
which is returning as "Not Found".

Would I be right in assuming this is the paper:
[http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~ext12366/readings/schmucker.pd...](http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~ext12366/readings/schmucker.pdf)

It says "Work in Progress". Was your copy the same? Any idea if he finished
it?

~~~
DonHopkins
Oops, I moved that to a sub-directory, and it's the same as the one you found.
And I put up a copy of the Fabrik paper that Alan sent me. Also be sure to
check out Chaim Gingold's Gadget Background Survey that he wrote at HARC in
2017, which is much more up-to-date and comprehensive!

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

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

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

\----

On 20 May 2018, at 10:08, Alan Kay wrote:

Hi Don

I recall "swiped pie menus" being used at Apple in the mid-80s (ca 86) in the
Fabrik visual language project. I'm pretty sure that the invention of this UI
at Apple was done by Dan Ingalls. I've attached one of the Fabrik papers that
mentions this idea.

You will probably want to include this in your retrospective history of the
the idea.

Cheers

Alan

\----

From: Don Hopkins Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2018 9:53 AM Subject: Re: Ready to
publish "Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective"

Thank you! I remember hearing the name Fabrik mentioned somewhere, but never
found much to read about it so I don’t know much about it.

I’ll read up on it and integrate it into my article!

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-
menus-936fed383ff1](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1)

I really enjoyed this paper “A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in
progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple. It
covered many of my favorite systems.

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

It reminds me of the much more modern an comprehensive "Gadget Background
Survey" that Chaim did at HARC, which includes your favorites Rockey’s Boots
and Robot Odyssey, and his amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams and lots of great
stuff I’d never seen before:

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

I've also been greatly inspired by the systems described in the classic books
“Visual Programming” by Nan C Shu, and “Watch What I Do: Programming by
Demonstration” edited by Alan Cypher. Brad Myers wrote several articles in
that about his stuff, like Peridot and Garnet (which I briefly worked on with
him at CMU, and was very cool, but needed a bit more right brain graphic
design if you know what I mean ;). To paraphrase Rumsfeld, "As you know, you
go to screen with the graphics API you have, not the graphics API you might
want or wish to have at a later time."

-Don

~~~
Flenser
Thanks!

------
berbec
I actually have the original box and disk on a shelf.

such great memories!!!!

------
iblaine
Wow, I spent so much time on this game. The minecraft of its era.

------
feefie
OMG! I have been looking for this for years (edit: decades!!) but didn't know
the name of it! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK
YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I am so happy!!

~~~
ddingus
:D

Funny, I just ran this on an Apple for someone who wanted to experience it.

The intro is pure magic.

------
busterarm
Gosh I played this so much as a kid. Got pretty far all on my own.

Somehow I'm dumber as an adult. :D

------
eb00
I cannot recommend this enough. I loved playing this with my dad when I was a
kid.

------
jlebrech
does anyone know the name of the black and white adventure game on macintosh
with a mouse and cheese?

