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The Mysterious Origins of an Uncrackable Atari Game

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app103:
Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it’s largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game’s source code to investigate how it was made. An early maze-navigating game, Entombed intrigued the researchers for how early programmers solved the problem of drawing a solvable maze that is drawn procedurally.

But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain. The fundamental logic that determines how the maze is drawn is locked in a table of possible values written in the games code. However, it seems the logic behind the table has been lost forever.


http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game

mouser:
Here's the pdf of the paper they wrote.  Looks like some fascinating, detailed info about the code, including a discussing of a bug in the pseudo random number generator, etc: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1811/1811.02035.pdf

I've downloaded it to read.

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