[HN Gopher] Lemonade Stand
___________________________________________________________________
Lemonade Stand
Author : elvis70
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-03-13 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (possiblywrong.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (possiblywrong.wordpress.com)
| brightball wrote:
| I loved that game when we got to play it at school as a kid. It
| was the first thing that made me think about supply and demand.
| anonymoose33282 wrote:
| Yeah, I remember in 5th grade we had a day where each kid got a
| turn on the classroom computer to see how far they could go.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| I think we played a later version in school and it really
| imprinted the concept in my brain. Also think the RNG didn't
| let probability go below a certain point in that version,
| remember charging $1000 for a glass of lemonade and making a
| sale.
| gweinberg wrote:
| The version I played on the ][+ was clearly not the one shown
| here, it didn't use a rng. The weather/event sequence was the
| same every time.
| rgmerk wrote:
| It may have been that they used a PRNG and gave it the same
| initial seed each time.
|
| There were all sorts of odd bits of programming in a lot of
| these early BASIC games; they were often done by self-taught
| programmers.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Now that I think of it, the computer didn't have a clock,
| didn't really have any source of entropy. So yeah, that's
| probably right.
| pvg wrote:
| There were memory mapped devices from which you could
| almost certainly squeeze some out so 'any' is maybe
| slightly overstated.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, my first game I ever wrote was a dog racing game in
| BASIC when I was 9. I didn't understand PRNG at all or
| anything about seeds, but I did notice that the same dog won
| the same race in order.
|
| My solution? At game launch, the game would print "hit space
| to start the game and then run a right loop over a 'rand'
| call until the user hit space. The entropy was in how long it
| took you to hit the spacebar!
| dmurray wrote:
| I remember this being the recommended way to get random
| numbers in some programming magazine or textbook, in a
| BASIC without built-in RAND(). Amazing work to discover
| this yourself at age 9!
|
| And if you squint, using mouse movements as a source of
| entropy is still used by some program. Some SSH key
| generators use it, and I'm sure I've had a Linux installer
| ask me for it too in recent years. I'm not sure whether
| this is theatre or whether the OS really can't be relied on
| to provide suitable entropy itself.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| I think old console games (e.g. for the NES) were like
| this. You can record the inputs for a speedrun dependant
| on RNG and replay them on a real console, and so long as
| the timing is maintained exactly, the RNG outputs will be
| the same. This has been demonstrated with a tool called
| TASbot.
| panozzaj wrote:
| I enjoyed this game! I have the ][ and played it on the "The
| Apple At Play" [1] disk (both are in the closet right behind me.)
| I think it actually might have been a different version than the
| one you have.
|
| I made a handful of GPT "games" a couple of months ago, one of
| which was a Lemonade Stand clone. Can try it out at [2].
|
| It does some interesting things around rolling random numbers in
| Python for the weather and it's nice that you can put in free-
| form text to say what you want to do for your actions. It's
| definitely more hackable than the original (good prompt security
| test.)
|
| [1]: https://archive.org/details/3d0g_059b_Apple_at_Play [2]:
| https://chat.openai.com/g/g-e7DwANYTS-lemonade-stand
| karmakaze wrote:
| How times have changed. At the time, I would also have been into
| reverse engineering it.
|
| Today I think I should make an RNN to solve it, and how fast I
| can get Applesoft BASIC to run for training.
| jetrink wrote:
| The first software I made that had users other than myself was a
| Lemonade Stand clone for the TI-83 Plus. I shared it with people
| at my school using a link cable and, as there wasn't much
| competition in the calculator game market, it was a big hit. The
| next school year, I attended a drivers ed class at our crosstown
| rival high school and found that my game had somehow spread to
| that school as well! I have no idea how it happened, but it was
| very satisfying seeing something I made have a life of its own.
| Ben Brode was on the Search Engine podcast recently and shared a
| very similar story.[1] I wonder how many other programmers of our
| generation had this experience.
|
| One thing that my game had that the original did not (and I don't
| know if I invented this or copied it from the version I played)
| was a hidden demand parameter that persisted between days.
| Advertising and word of mouth from satisfied customers would
| cause it increase, while customers going away empty-handed would
| cause it to decrease. That turned the game into a kind of clicker
| where the numbers could continue to go up and up. I also added
| the ability to save your game by serializing the game state to an
| image file, since that was the only way to save data on the TI-83
| Plus that wasn't likely to be clobbered by another program.
|
| 1. https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-do-you-make-an-
| addictive-v...
| joshstrange wrote:
| I didn't see my games/programs get spread like that exactly but
| I got my start on the TI-84+ SE and spent a ton of time on
| ticalc (can't remember if it was .com or .org) forums and
| uploaded programs and games to their archives.
|
| I wore the buttons off my calculator and did 90%+ of my
| programming on it (only used the desktop app to write and push
| code to the calculator near the end of my time using it). Then
| I took a HS class on Java, taught myself PHP, and never really
| looked back to my calculator. TI-BASIC was a great start but so
| limiting once I discovered other languages.
| joezydeco wrote:
| There were two cassette-tape programs that shipped with the Apple
| ][ that arrived in our school. _Lemonade Stand_ and _The Great
| American Probability Machine_.
|
| https://whatifmath.org/the-great-american-probability-machin...
|
| This was the old fun, quirky 1970s Apple Computer, Inc. I still
| fondly remember.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I've been trying to find info on the actual game, but all I can
| find are biographical stories like this one. It _sounds_
| interesting by the name! I just wish I could find more info
| about the game itself
| emmelaich wrote:
| Seems like it's some simulation of Pascal's Triangle with a
| Pachinko feel?
|
| I'd like to know more too!
|
| https://www.digibarn.com/collections/software/apple2/apple2e.
| ..
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-13 23:00 UTC)