Page 276 - The Ultimate Palm Robot

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Bots /The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 10

Chapter 10 Having Fun with Your Robot 259

Even though no one moved very fast, it was a gripping arcade experience any-
way, probably because the robots taunted you with the ominous threat that
they would, indeed, get the humanoid (that audio taunt was arguably the
game’s coolest feature). And eventually, they always did.
The other great robot classic was Daleks, a Doctor Who-derived title for the
Macintosh in which you wandered around a field full of Delek robots, and
they inevitably converged on you with a single-minded obsession that caused
them to bump into each other in the process, annihilating themselves. Therein
was the solution: Daleks was something of a puzzle game, in which you
moved around the screen to get the robots to run into each other. Your sole
weapon—a teleporting Sonic Screwdriver—was always a last resort.

All that’s a long-winded way of getting to the fact that Botz combines both
gaming experiences into a single treat for the Palm. In real-time mode, Botz
simulates a game of Berzerk, in which you run away from the persistent-
but-sluggish robots bent on your destruction. In turn-based mode, you try to
collect goodies from the screen while helping the Dalek-like robots run into
each other. The full version of Botz is $9.95.

Nanobots
In many ways, robotic hardware is the easy part of designing and building a
robot. Programming a robot to respond intelligently to its environment with-
out being programmed with contingencies on how to deal with every single
aspect of the world is the hard part. And many roboticists, of course, realize
that traditional programming techniques simply won’t cut it.

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Monday, May 12, 2003 1:22:34 PM