Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online

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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/139

Discussion with Alan Kay about Robot Odyssey

One of Alan Kay's favorite games is Robot Odyssey! I wrote to him:

From: Don Hopkins Subject: Robot Odyssey

One thing I've always wanted to do is a re-make of Robot Odyssey, with the full power of a real programming language underneath it, and lots of cool toys for the robots to play with! That was such a powerful concept for a game!

-Don

From: Alan Kay Subject: Robot Odyssey

I actually argued with him [Will Wright] and Maxis for not making SimCity very educational. E.g. the kids can't open the hood to see the assumptions made by SimCity (crime can be countered by more police stations) and try other assumptions (raise standard of living to counter crime) etc. I've never thought of it as a particularly good design for educational purposes.

However, I have exactly the opposite opinion of Robot Odyssey, which I thought was a brilliant concept when the TLC people brought it to me at Atari in the early 80s. (Rocky's Boots is pretty much my all time favorite for a great game that really teaches and also has a terrific intro to itself done in itself, etc. Warren Robinette is a very special designer.).

The big problem with Robot Odyssey (as I tried to explain to them) was that the circuits-programming didn't scale to the game. They really needed to move to something like an object-oriented event-driven Logo with symbolic scripting to allow the kids to really get into the wonderful possibilities for strategies and tactics. (BTW, Etoys is kind of an OO event-driven Logo (not an accident), and the next version of it has as a goal to be able to do Robot Odyssey in a reasonable way. This got delayed because of funding problems but we now have funding and are really going to do it this year. Want to help design and build it?)

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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/134

Alan Kay's ideas about SimCity for OLPC

I just received this exciting email from Alan Kay. I totally agree with the direction he wants to take SimCity for the OLPC!

-Don

From: Alan Kay To: Don Hopkins Date: 11/9/2007 6:14 PM Subject: SimCity for OLPC

Hi Don --

I'm writing to applaud you for your plans to reimplement SimCity for children on the OLPC.

My main complaint about this game has always been the rigidity, and sometimes stupidity, of its assumptions (counter crime with more police stations) and the opaqueness of its mechanism (children can't find out what its actual assumptions are, see what they look like, or change them to try other systems dynamics).

So I have used SimCity as an example of an anti-ed environment despite all the awards it has won. It's kind of an air-guitar environment.

In the past, I tried to get Maxis to take the actual (great) educational possibilities more seriously, but to no avail.

Going to Python can help a few areas of this, but a better abstraction for the heart of Sim-City would be a way to show its rules/heuristics in a readable and writable form. Both of these could be stylized to put them in the child's own thinking and doing world. For example, just the simple route of making a drag and drop scripting interface for Etoys allows children to make very readable and writeable scripts and helps the children concentrate on what they are trying to do. A carefully designed object system (that is filtered fro children) can expose the environment so they can really think about it.

I'm not at all suggesting that Etoys be used here, but I am suggesting that some deep design be done to come up with a "behavior modification interface" that allows real creativity on the part of the children. So it is much more than stringing black boxes together or having to deal with fragile procedurals.

I sense that you have some interests in making SimCity really a microworld for children's learning and exploration from reading your webpage.

Children in 4th - 6th grade can do a lot here if they are given a good UI and tools. So, we could think of part of this project as a "pre-Python" UI.

Scalability and non-scalability of ideas are interesting. Rocky's Boots is still one of the best ever games that provide profound learning experiences. The extension of this to Robot Odyssey didn't work because the logic and wires programming didn't scale well enough -- the bang per effort dropped off precipitously. I was Chief Scientist at Atari at that time (Warren Robbinet worked for me) and I worked with TLC to try to get them to realize that something like Logo, or even better, a rule-based robot programming system, was needed. The failure of Robot Odyssey really pained me because I thought that the concept of this game was one of the best ever (still is). But it just needed a much better notion of how the children were going to program the robots. I think the same goes for SimCity.

Cheers,

Alan

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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/140

Discussion with Alan Kay about Visual Programming

[...]

SimCity is similar but more pernicious. It is a black box of "soft somewhat arbitrary knowledge" that the children can't look at, question or change. For example, SC gets the players to discover that the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations. Most anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists would disagree violently. Alternate assumptions can't be tried, etc.

Both of these packages have won many "educational awards" from the pop culture, but in many ways they are anti-real-education because they miss what modern knowledge and thinking and epistemology are all about. This is why being "above threshold" and really understanding what this means is the deep key to making modern curricula and computer environments that will really help children lift themselves.

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http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-March/001829.ht...

[sugar] Ideas about SimCity gui, turtle graphics, and cellular automata

Instead of (or in addition to) using the mouse to paint with a palette of editing tools like Photoshop, the interface could be based on agents like logo turtles that represent the user on the map, which carry around SimCity editing tools that they can draw with. When you throw in a visual programming language, it leads the way to a Robot-Odyssey-esque version of SimCity!

[...]

Redesigning the SimCity user interface for the OLPC Don Hopkins

    Visual Programming

      Logo Turtles (as a generalization of the monster, tornado,
      helicopter, etc)

        Implement programmable logo turtles as agents that can move
        around on the map, sense it, and edit it. 

	Like Robot Odyssey agents, so you can go "inside" an agent,
	and travel around with it, operate its controls, read its
	sensors, and automate its behavior by wiring up visual programs
	with logic and math and nested "ic chip" components.

	Plug in graphics to represent the agent: use classic logo
	turtle and SimCity sprites, but also allow kids to plug in
	their own.
	  SimCity sprites have 8 rotations. 
	  SVG or Cairo drawings can be rotated continuously.

        Re-implement the classic SimCity agents like the monster,
        tornado, helicopter, train, etc in terms of logo turtles, that
        kids can drive around, learn to use, open up and modify (by
        turning internal tuning knobs, or even rewiring).

	Let kids reprogram the agents to do all kinds of other stuff.

	Mobile robots, that you can double click to open up into
	Robot-Odyssey-esque visual program editors.

	Agents have local cellular-automata-like sensors to read
	information about the current and surrounding tiles.

	KidSim / Cocoa / StageCraft Creator let kids define visual
	cellular automata rules by example, based on tile patterns and
	rules. Show it a pattern that you want to match by selecting
	an instance of that pattern in the world, then abstract it
	with wildcards if necessary, then demonstrate the result you
	want it to change the cell to in the next generation.

	Sense high level information about zones and overlays, so the
	agents can base their behavior on any aspect of the world
	model.

	  Support an extensible model by allowing users to add more
	  layers.

	    Add layers with arbitrary names and data types at
	    different resolutions:

	      byte, int, float, n-dimensional vector, color, boolean
	      mask, musical note, dict, parametric field (i.e. perlin
	      noise or other mathematical function) at each cell, etc.

	Edit the world. 

	  All SimCity editing tools (including colored pens that draw
	  on overlays) should be available to the agent.

	  Enable users to plug in their own editing tools, that they
	  can use themselves with the mouse, keyboard or game
	  controller, or program agents to use to edit the map under
	  program control.

      Robot Odyssey

        Build your own universal programmable editing tool.
	Roll your own von Neuman Universal Constructor. 
	Smart robots you program to perform special purpose editing tasks. 

	The "Painter" picture editing program had a way of recording
	and playing back high level editing commands, relative to the
	current cursor position.

	Remixing. Journaling. Programming by demonstration or example.
	You could use a tape recorder to record a bunch of SimCity
	editing commands that you act out (or you can just select them
	from the journal), then you can play those tapes back with
	relative coordinates, so they apply relative to where the
	agent currently is on the map. You can copy and paste and cut
	and splice any editing commands into tapes that you can use to
	program the robot to play back in arbitrary sequences. 

	Program an urban sprawl development-bot to lay out entire
	residential subdivisions, complete with zones, roads, parks and
	wires. Then program a luddite roomba-bot that sucks them all
	up and plants trees in their place.

	This becomes really fun when we let players plug in their own
	programmed zones for the robot to lay out, and layers of data
	to control the robot's behavior, out of which they can program
	their own cellular automata rules and games (like KidSim /
	Cocoa / StageCraft Creator).

Hi SJ --

Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for those who would like to try their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming systems.

This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results there helped with the later Etoys design.

Cheers,

Alan

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From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:57:51 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore

Thanks SJ --

We are benefiting here from Don Hopkins' generosity (and of the original designers and owners of these games).

The basic notion is that there are many games that, if modularized with nice separable interfaces, would be great environments for exploring various kinds of "learning by doing". For example, there is a nice separation between the "rules/dynamics" of a games world and the "strategies/actions" of the characters. There could be a third separation to break out the graphics and sound routines as a media environment.

For example, in SimCity, the first and most useful breakout for children would be to allow various UIs to be made that would let children find out about and try experiments with the "city dynamics rules". It's not clear what the best forms for this would be, so it would be great to have a variety of different designers supply modules that would try to bridge the gaps to the child users.

This could work even for pretty young children (we helped the Open Magnet School set up Doreen Nelson's "City Building" curriculum in the third grade of the school and this was very successful -- a child controlled SimCity would have been wonderful to have).

Maybe this separation could be set up via the D-bus so that separate processes written in any language the authors choose could be used. This would open this game up to different experiments by different researchers to explore different kinds of UIs and strategy languages for various ages of children. I think this would be really cool! We would all learn a lot from this and the children would benefit greatly.

A trickier deal would be the world dynamics (I'm just guessing here, but Don would know). This is one of the really great things about SimCity -- it can really accommodate lots of different changes and stitch things together to make a pretty decent simulation without too many seams showing. (Given the machines this game originally ran on, many of the heuristics are likely to be a little patchy. Don has indicated as much.) I think doing a great world dynamics engine for games like SimCity would be really wonderful -- and could even be a thesis project or two.

Don has talked about doing the separations so that many new games can be made in addition to the variations.

Similarly, Robot Odyssey (one of the best games concepts ever) was marred by choosing a way to program the robots where the complexity of programming grew much faster than the functionality that could be given to the robots. This game was way ahead of its time.

Again, the idea would be do make a game in which environment, levels of challenge, and how the robots are programmed would be broken out into separate processes that a variety of gamers and researchers could do experiments in language and UI.

One of the most wonderful possibilities about this venture is that it will bring together very fluent designers from many worlds of computing (more worlds than usually combine to make a game) in the service of the children. We should really try to pull this off!

Cheers,

Alan