That was over 40 years ago. It was called “Water Carrier”. It created a random labyrinth with an entry on the left and an exit on the right, and a number of puddles in it. You could not cross the puddles, but had to “pick them up” with your bucket. Of course, only one puddle fit in that bucket, so you had to empty it at the entrance in order to scoop up the next puddle on your way to the exit. For scoring, it counted the number of steps one needed to get through.
The labyrinth was one of the algorithmic challenges I had as a kid. There was no internet to look up algorithms like that, and the local libraries had no computer related books. So I invented the algorithm myself. Same with sorting, for the “high scores”, which were actually “low scores”, the less steps you needed, the better. For that, I “invented” what I many years later learned was Bubble Sort.
That was over 40 years ago. It was called “Water Carrier”. It created a random labyrinth with an entry on the left and an exit on the right, and a number of puddles in it. You could not cross the puddles, but had to “pick them up” with your bucket. Of course, only one puddle fit in that bucket, so you had to empty it at the entrance in order to scoop up the next puddle on your way to the exit. For scoring, it counted the number of steps one needed to get through.
The labyrinth was one of the algorithmic challenges I had as a kid. There was no internet to look up algorithms like that, and the local libraries had no computer related books. So I invented the algorithm myself. Same with sorting, for the “high scores”, which were actually “low scores”, the less steps you needed, the better. For that, I “invented” what I many years later learned was Bubble Sort.
And sorry, no link to it ;-)