Hunt The Wumpus
Hunt The WumpusA computer game. It comes from a distant time before when computer games were judged by how many fully-shaded and textured polygons per second could be rendered.
Anyone remember the details of the game? All I remember was that you're in a cave, and each room of the cave connects to other rooms. You shoot your weapon into a room before entering it, and you either kill the Wumpus or do nothing. As the Wumpus moves around the cave, you are given some indication of his position relative to you. Using logic and luck, you can figure out the position of the Wumpus and kill it dead.
I'm sure there were countless variations on the theme.
Wiki itself is kind of like Hunt The Wumpus. Each page is like a room, with potentially many exits to other pages. Instead of shooting an arrow, you add text to a page. Occasionally, nothing happens. But sometimes the Wumpus comes swooping in to refactor your text.
The cave was a dodecahedron, with one room for each vertex. Each of the 20 rooms adjoined 3 other rooms. Some rooms had pits -- moving into them killed you instantly. "You feel a draft" is how you knew one of the adjacent rooms had a pit. Some rooms had bats ("you hear bats"), which would pick you up and deposit you in another room at random. One room had a Wumpus. "You smell a Wumpus" is how you knew you were adjacent to the Wumpus. If you moved into the same room as the WUMPUS, it would move (0.75) or kill you (0.25). You could, however, shoot an arrow into an adjacent room (or even a not-so-adjacent room, provided you could say what rooms it needed to move through), and if that room contained the Wumpus, you would kill him and win the game. The Wumpus moved, too, but only when you shot an arrow and missed him or moved into his room. (And only 3/4 of the time in that case.)
EricRaymond translated it into C, keeping even the horrible user interface. Try this for a blast from the past. Compiles great with the latest gcc -- just type "make" and then "wumpus".
I ported this version into Java, still preserving the horrible user interface. I'll get round to making it available sometime -- AndrewMcGuinness
This page incurred a serious flashback to being 13 years old and learning to program by laboriously retyping game source code from magazines into my CommodoreVic20. So I went digging in the basement and found...
My 1979 copy of More Basic Computing Games includes source code for Wumpus I and Wumpus II, plus a writeup by the author. Wumpus I is 251 lines of Basic - about 20% of those are the PRINT statements for the instructions.
Wumpus II is approximately twice as long.
According to the book, HuntTheWumpus was written by Gregory Yob, and first published in the September/October 1975 issue of Creative Computing and a People's Computer Company newsletter from the same time.
This page takes me back. It was playing HuntTheWumpus and Adventure on a Honeywell mainframe at the age of 7 (or thereabouts) that got me into computers in the first place. I was inspired by the ability to create interactive, imaginary universes inside the machine. From that start I moved on to an Apple ][, Commodore Pets, a Sinclair ZX81 and, of course, the Sinclair Spectrum. Then I read TheSoulOfaNewMachine and my fate was sealed! Ahhhh nostalgia ain't what it used to be... --NatPryce
Have a Java applet with a Wumpus-like game somewhat similar to the original, but with a graphical display:
It has the Wumpus and the pits, but no bats. And if you fire your arrow and miss, you lose. (...no "the wumpus moved" for you. ;-)I played with the source code for this one for a while, as a possible project for the XPSTL group (XpStLouis). But we ended up using the XP Universe version, below. -- JeffGrigg
In a Flash version of the game from 2003, you're a UN weapons inspector searching for WMD in pre-war Iraq.
XP Universe Java version of "Hunt the Wumpus:"
There's a Java console-based version in the Files section of the "extremeprogramming" Yahoo group:
See "wumpus.zip", "hunt the wumpus java source", 6 KB by garethreeves on 08/01/2001. I believe it was developed test-first.
See also Hunter, in Darkness http://www.wurb.com/if/game/483
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