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Logic Circuits and Video Games
By Jacob Cohen | December 7, 2007
In 1984, The Learning Company published a gamed called Robot Odyssey. The basic premise of this game is that you are a human who has fallen into a world full of robots called Robotropolis, and you are trying to make your way back to the human world.
I had a copy of this game for the Apple 2, and spent many hours playing it when I was young. One of the cool things that it let you do was build circuits using a toolkit that contained various logic gates. The toolkit contained basic logic gates such as OR, AND, NOR, NOT, as well as flip flops and a soldering iron that let you connect them all together.
You also pick up a set of robots as you travel through Robotropolis. Your human character can walk into these robots and ride around inside them, which can protect you from the sentries that will prevent your character from passing through certain areas.
One of the first challenges you have to overcome with your robots and logic gate toolkit is to navigate through a maze guarded by a sentry. You can’t just walk through as a human, because the sentry will stop you. You have to ride inside the robot. To accomplish this, you need to create a circuit inside the robot that connects its battery, thrusters, and impact sensors in such a way that it will navigate the maze.
The most basic way to do this is to create a wall-hugger algorithm using the sensors and thrusters. If the right-hand sensor is activated, meaning there is a wall to the right of the robot, then activate the up thruster. If there is a wall to the left, activate the down thruster. If there is a wall above, activate the left thruster, and if there is a wall below, activate the right thruster. This will have a robot follow a wall around the edge of a room, which is enough for simple mazes.
However, a true wall hugger needs to be able to follow an “outside” corner as well as an “inside” corner. To accomplish this, you can add some more logic that lets it follow an outside corner and reconnect with the wall if it finds itself having left the wall and flown out into empty space.
There are some more complex puzzles later on, such as using the grabber arm on the robot to go fetch a key from the middle of a room that is patrolled by a sentry that can see you even if you are in the robot. You have to program the robot to go to the right place, grab the key, then return.
The cool thing about this program is it teaches you all about designing logic circuits. I found my logic design courses in college to be extremely easy because I had spent a good amount of time doing exactly the same thing when I was younger.
Another game in a similar vein was called Rocky’s Boots.
The thing I liked most about these games was that they required very little hand-eye coordination (I was never very good at such games) but involved a lot of problem solving and being able to learn things by trying them and seeing how it works, revising your approach slightly, and trying again.
Topics: General |
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December 22nd, 2007 at 2:30 am
haha
April 4th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
The thing I liked most about these games was that they required very little hand-eye coordination (I was never very good at such games) but involved a lot of problem solving and being able to learn things by trying them and seeing how it works, revising your approach slightly, and trying again.
really? cause you never seemed to have much trouble kicking my ass at street fighter 2