GNU Robots is a computer game for programmers. The goal is to guide a robotsimulation around a maze, consuming food, avoiding baddies, and collecting as many prizes as possible in the process. However, the player cannot control the robot once the game begins; the robot acts according to a Scheme script previously written by the player.
On discovering GNU Robots, a programmer is likely to miss a nights sleep due to an addictive cycle of programming, running, and tweaking. Scheme's inherent simplicity and the supplied example scripts makes it easy to get started.
GNU Robots was originally written by Jim Hall, but he no longer works on it. Its current maintainer is Tim Northover. The game uses Guile to interpret the Scheme instructions which must be stored in a file.
On most systems, the executable is named robots, but on DebianGNU/Linux (and possibly some others), it's named grobots to avoid clashing with another package.
External links
GNU Robots homepage (http://www.gnu.org/software/robots/robots.html)
GNU Guile homepage (http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html)
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The GNU project was announced publicly on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups.
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The "GNU" in GNU Hurd indicates that it is a part of the GNU project, while "GNU/Hurd" distinguishes it as one of the two currently available GNU systems--that is, Linux-based GNU systems (or "GNU/Linux") as opposed to Hurd-based GNU systems (or "GNU/Hurd").