| T.R | Title | User | Personal
Name | Date | Lines |
|---|
| 142.1 | | R2ME2::GILBERT | | Tue Jul 30 1985 18:53 | 10 |
| Hmmm. I wrote something similar as a test for ANIMOD, a package of routines
for doing minimal-screen updating (yes, Stan, it's in the toolshed).
I believe that WORM is included in the ANIMOD stuff in the STC, but, if not,
then you can grab WORM.MAR and WORM.EXE from HARE::SYS$PUBLIC: (while the
supply lasts). Just run it, and specify from 1 to 100 worms. The first
person to discover the major, but random and subtle difference in behaviour
it sometimes exhibits wins a cookie!
- Gilbert
|
| 142.2 | | ALIEN::POSTPISCHIL | | Wed Jul 31 1985 18:13 | 6 |
| Re .1:
Are you referring to the fact that the worms do not cross over each other?
-- edp
|
| 142.3 | | R2ME2::GILBERT | | Wed Jul 31 1985 23:58 | 2 |
| re .-1
Do you mean that sometimes they cross over each other and sometimes they don't?
|
| 142.4 | | BEING::POSTPISCHIL | | Thu Aug 01 1985 09:51 | 7 |
| Re .3:
I haven't seen them cross over each other yet. I noticed they sometimes vary
in length, but I do not know if there is any rule they following in doing this.
-- edp
|
| 142.5 | | SPRITE::OSMAN | | Thu Aug 01 1985 10:14 | 24 |
| I've tried the program, and it works fairly well.
However, mine was "better" due to a bit of vector work I did.
I originally observed in my program that the worms varied in length.
I realized that the reason was that they folded over themselves at
backstrainingly sharp angles.
So I modifed the program so that worms tried not to turn too sharply.
You might considering enhancing yours in this manner.
More specifically, if a worm is travelling north, I try to give it
only three choices (in the king's move world), namely continue north,
head northwest, or head northeast.
This allows the worms to look a bit more like worms.
Another feature of my program was the choice by the user of whether worms
should leave trails behind, or whether an initial field of dots should be
supplied for the worms to eat. These features were both visually interesting
and a fairly good visual test of the random number generator !
/Eric
|
| 142.6 | | ALIEN::POSTPISCHIL | | Thu Aug 01 1985 12:06 | 12 |
| Re .5:
> I originally observed in my program that the worms varied in length.
>
> I realized that the reason was that they folded over themselves at
> backstrainingly sharp angles.
The varying lengths in Gilbert's program are not due to worms retracing their
paths. The phenomenon appears to be deliberate.
-- edp
|
| 142.7 | | MARRHQ::RMURPHY | | Thu Aug 01 1985 12:57 | 3 |
| re: .1
Maggots?
-Rick
|
| 142.8 | | R2ME2::GILBERT | | Thu Aug 01 1985 14:57 | 11 |
| re: .1
Responses 2 and 5 are close to finding the "major, but subtle
difference in behaviour that occurs at random".
re: .7
Sorry, that's major and random, but not very subtle.
Hint: Roughly half the time it behaves one way, half the time the other.
It's will be very noticable, after watching for just a couple seconds,
ONCE you learn how to observe.
|
| 142.9 | | ALIEN::POSTPISCHIL | | Fri Aug 02 1985 18:41 | 14 |
| I must modify my statement about the worms not crossing over each other.
More specifically, they seem to never move onto a position already occupied;
they can cross each other diagonally:
b a
ba
ab
a b.
Also, the lengths not only decrease below the value specified by the user, but
also grow on occasion. But I still seem to be missing something.
-- edp
|
| 142.10 | | R2ME2::GILBERT | | Sat Aug 03 1985 23:36 | 4 |
| Oops. On V4.0 systems, the worms weren't very random. You could try asking
for 3 worms of length 10 in the old image, or grab the more recent copy of
the image for something a bit more random. You see, the program adjusts
its random number generator (occasionally) by adding in @#EXE$GQ_SYSTIME.
|