101–110 of 124 posts
Is it really a bug if it hasn't affected the integrity of the game for 55 years? ducks
See e.g. Glitchipedia: https://errors.fandom.com/wiki/Glitchipedia:About
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Though famous as the first lunar lander game, the impressive part was the specific numerical techniques used.
OP here. Yes, that's what I meant. Using the rocket equation, truncated Taylor series approximation, truncating even more to make things solvable, then iterating to improve the solution, were all things I wouldn't have expected.
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Another curious feature is that the labels appears to be floating point, as in "G 5.9" appears to transfer control to line starting at "05.90".
They aren't actually floating-point: each label is a pair of numbers, the first denoting the group and the second denoting the line within that group. The groups have no semantic importance, they are only for organization.
And the "DO" command takes a group number, runs each line within the group, then returns after the end of the group. So each group can effectively act as a subroutine. (In this particular game, this can be seen in groups 6 and 9.)
I first played this game on an HP-25 calculator back in 1976, using the same formulas as the article explains. https://www.hpmuseum.org/software/25moonld.htm
Memory hazy, but I think I used the inbuilt calculus features of the calculator to get a perfect landing with a burn of 45 (about half the fuel) on say turn 12.
I had no prior expectation of what the optimum burn was and certainly had not heard of a 'suicide burn'.
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Yeah, I think we're agreeing. :) So it turns out, before discovering the bug, I actually wrote code to find the optimal sequence when your choices are restricted to integers. I thought, along the same lines as you, "maybe if you burn 165 or 170 or something in the first non-zero term, then you could burn less on the 14 turn and still land." And this is how I know it's not possible, at least with integer burn rates. :…
I think they are saying that you need to switch to 199.999... lbs/s for all the 200 lbs/s burns, not just the last one. Just trying to clarify where you seem to be speaking past each other, though it seems that this might simply lead to a non-optimal strategy (i.e. taking more time to land than theoretically possible, however minute the difference is).
> and then replace one of the subsequent 200 lbs/second inputs with 199.99999999 lbs/second
> replace one
indeed not the last one, but no, not "all"
Myst inspired many people to go into computer science and game development as well, so it's interesting to see how much of a snowball effect this Lunar Lander game had
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Automobiles are more (wear-)efficient at braking when they use the engine to brake, not the brakes, so that would probably be a better approach to automate
A long time ago, in a book whose title I don’t remember, a character said, “but engine parts are more expensive than brake parts”. That has always stuck with me, even as I glide to a stop with almost no braking.
Wow, pretty amazing. I remember playing this game after somebody ported it to Wang 2200 BASIC sometime in the mid 1970s. I didn't figure out how to land it myself, but I remember being shown the technique of coasting for the first several turns before applying maximum thrust. I don't recall the term "suicide burn" though. (Or maybe that term came in later when the Kerbal Space Program became popular.) I also remember…
I recall lunar lander being available on, IIRC, ADM-3 terminals at Lawrence in early 1973, usually surrounded by a cluster of male teens. One "feature" of the kiosk mode for games was that a carefully-timed Ctrl-C would escape kiosk mode, and allow the user to play other games. Happenstance, or catnip for proto-hackers?
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It needs access to a computer, creativity, and an impressive amount of capability for a high school senior. This is 5 years before pong - you are inventing game concepts from scratch rather than standing on the shoulders of giants.
> and an impressive amount of capability for a high school senior It's only impressive because very few (none?) high schools teach calculus at the level required for his implementation. High schoolers are quite capable of handling that kind of calculus, it's just that the high schools don't teach it.
If anyone is curious, in 2009, I discovered that Jim Storer was the author of the first Lunar Lander game and interviewed him about it (and also chronicled the history of the game beyond that). He later provided the source code, which was awesome. https://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/index.html My favorite part is this: “After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until…
I'm honored to be included in this article--I wrote Lander (1990) originally for Windows 2.x. When I applied for a job to work on Lotus Notes (back in 1989), I showed the interviewer (Tim Halvorsen) my Lander game. He said, "That's pretty cool--let's try running it on Windows 3." At first, I thought, cool! I get to see Windows 3 (which had not yet been released). But then he said, "Windows 3 runs everything in protec…