Back when I was at school, I remember tinkering with a Mac game where you programmed little robots in a sort of pseudo-assembler language which could then battle each other. They could move themselves around the arena, look for opponents in different directions, and fire some sort of weapon. Pretty basic stuff, but I remember it quite fondly, even if I can't remember the name.
Are there any good modern day equivalents?
I used to have a lot of fun coding my own robot with Robocode in college.
It is Java based, the API is detailled and it's pretty easy to get a challenging robot up and running.
Here is an example :
public class MyFirstRobot extends Robot {
public void run() {
while (true) {
ahead(100);
turnGunRight(360);
back(100);
turnGunRight(360);
}
}
public void onScannedRobot(ScannedRobotEvent e) {
fire(1);
}
}
The game in question was definitely Robowar for the Mac. My son had a lot of fun with it and went on to program real robots.
As mentioned earlier by Proud, there is a wiki page for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboWar
Although there has not been a lot of activity surrounding the game over the last few years, there was a tournament held recently, and there is a yahoo email group.
Another good one is CEEBot. It teaches C / Java style programming in a fun, robot-programming kind of game. It is aimed at 10-15 year olds, but it is a good one.
I have to give a shout out to RobotWar which was the first programming "game" that I played way back in the Apple II days. It was written by Silas Warner of Castle Wolfenstein fame.
One interesting historical game is the old Robot Odyssey, which was essentially a game where you programmed robots by building logic circuits out of gates and flip flops. I remembered it clearly when I took real EE classes over a decade later.