- Worms?
"Worms?" is a
1983 computer game written byDavid Maynard forElectronic Arts , released for the Atari 800 andCommodore 64 .The game is fairly abstract, like
Conway's Game of Life , but the player's ostensible goal is to optimally program one or more "worm"s (each a sort ofcellular automaton ) to grow and survive as long as possible. The game area is divided up into hexagonal cells, and the worms are essentially programmed to move in a particular direction for each combination of filled-in and empty frame segments in their immediate vicinity. Over the course of a game, the player needs to give his/her worm less and less input, and more and more moves by their worm result in the encountering of familiar situation for which the worm has already been 'trained'. As the worms move, they generatealeatoric music .References
* [http://www.thelegacy.de/Museum/3436/ TheLegacy article on "Worms?"] including screenshot and cover.
* "Worm Paths", chapter 17 in: Martin Gardner, 1986, "Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Entertainments", W. H. Freeman and Company.
* "Patterson's Worm", Michael Beeler, MIT AI Memo #290. (early 1970s?)
* [http://search.cpan.org/~avif/Games-Worms/ Games::Worms] , a Perl implementation of a "Worms?"-like game, by
Sean M. Burke .
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