BigEd wrote:
To come very slightly more towards on-topic, there was a Basic guessing game called, I think, ANIMAL which self-modified, learning with play ever more examples of animals and their distinguishing characteristics. While ANIMAL can run on a microcomputer, it might be that 20Q requires just a little too much data. Or maybe not, maybe it's a good challenge to implement it on a 6502, or '816.
Animal Learning game. I've played & written a few variants. It's a simple binary tree search and the game usually starts off with just 2 animals and builds from there. It
can work quit well.
It can also be corrupted trivially easy...
Think of an animal. Does it have red hair?
Yes
Is the animal you're thinking of an Orangutan?
No
OK. I give-up. What was the name of the animal you're thinking of?
Gordon
And what question might distinguish a Gordon from an Orangutan?
Does it have freckles?
And the answer for a Gordon is?
Yes.
and so on.
the first one I played was actually an example of a random access file held on an Apple II disc under apple DOS. Each record had pointers to Yes/No records depending on the answer. As school kids we managed to load up the database with dozens of people and things with
hilarious results when teacher came to review...
The early Creative computing version (might be in 101 Basic games, not checked yet) used BASIC data statements and stored into an array - I guess it could be self modifying to write out a file of DATA statements to be merged into the program for the next run, but I've not checked.
Writing one in BASIC is just a data manipulation exercise. Can be made much easier if you have random access files.
This:
https://unicorn.drogon.net/animals.rtbis my own implementation in my own BASIC but it was based on the Apple II Integer Basic version I played ~45 years back...
-Gordon
_________________
--
Gordon Henderson.
See my
Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here:
https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/