1.1 The Beginning🔗

Robot World was conceived by Ron Jeffries and friends and revealed in August 2024. This was their description:

Robot World is a client-server game. The world (server) provided is your typical square grid world, details later. The world has a number of different kinds of objects in it, treasures, tricks, traps, and your bot. A bot is a device or creature for exploring the world, which is hostile to human life but has resources that humans want. Your mission is to field one or more biots, forage for resources, sell them at bases which export them back to earth. You can trade with other bots as well.

Your bot needs food and fuel. Its senses are weak: at a moderate distance around itself, it can determine that there is some thing, and the thing’s coordinates, but not what the thing is. At a closer distance, probably directly adjacent to the thing, your bot gets more information, but not much. Your bot can try to communicate with the thing, offering to buy or sell things. It can try to harvest the thing, which might be food or fuel or some valuable trade item.

It’s early days, so even this much is uncertain and to be figured out as we go.

Robot World is an example project. ... We propose, if things work out, to invite other developers to create clients for the game, in a language and style of their choice, to help learners see how we do things.

And possibly, the project will itself serve as an example of how to create a significant program, not by specifying it in advance, but by evolving the understanding of what the program is while building the program.

I began working with these ideas and following the project’s progress a little while later. It seems the original goal has fallen by the wayside and Ron is pursuing other related ideas. My progress has continued, increasingly diverging from where Ron is going now.