You all know the score. Your teacher allows you to make a Scratch project for your school project. You're working hard, using those "switch costume to []" and the "change x by ()" blocks. Then you realize, it all comes down to one thing: where are the Zen simulations for Scratch? Look no further. robotfindskitten is in fact a Zen simulation. And it's for Scratch 2.0. And the TI-84 Plus CE. And Linux. And the PalmOS. And the Sega Dreamcast. And your Web Browser. And an empty pop can. The application of this to the previous paragraph is left as an exercise for the reader. P. A. Peterson II originally stumbled across the contest concept 'robotfindskitten' when perusing Jake Berendes' web pages in 1996, which he found via the Crupper Scupper Supper Upper and the Flupperdupper Maleatora's early vision into search-engine (and Web- Counter™) tom-foolery. Not led by the promise of illicit imagery, but instead by the 10k-per-day hits their site got in 1996. Jake had a contest for his friends called "robotfindskitten", wherein they would submit pictures depicting, well, robotfindskitten. Apparently not too many people submitted. Well, ok, two people submitted, but both of those were drawings of a robot obliterating a kitten in some way. kitten remained unfound. Later, Peterson started "Nerth Pork", a now-defunct webzine for the output of some good stuff and also quite a lot of bad stuff. Peterson thought that moving the "robotfindskitten" contest to Nerth Pork would be useful, fun, and might attract submissions. It didn't. Well, not many. Leonard Richardson (of Crummy and segfault.org fame) originally wrote "robotfindskitten" for DOS in 1997 as his submission to the robotfindskitten contest. It won first prize (the fact that there were no other entrants may have had something to do with it). In 1999, Richardson decided to rewrite robotfindskitten for everyone's favorite operating system called Linux: Linux! Almost two years later, robotfindskitten was rediscovered by a bunch of free-software lunatics who thought that rfk love needed to be spread around. Hilarity ensued. Actually, everyone found great fulfillment in the simulatedly being robot, finding kitten, and so they decided that robotfindskitten needed to be brought to the rest of the world. And then came a PalmOS port. And then a CGI. And then Dreamcast. And then GameBoy. And then someone wrote robotfindskitten for an empty pop can... you get the idea, and the rest... ...is history. Yet to be written. Now, kitten-finding-by-robot goodness is available to all for the cost of internet access. The license? Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, of course. (Elsewhere, it'll be GPL.) Enjoy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This game is slow(er on Windows and ChromeOS) because I may have taken the liberty to write this as a single sequence. I was aiming for a 1s1s (one sprite, one script), but limitations forced me to run the main game through a custom block. Also, since lists don't have a monospace font, you should bump into letters from the side, if possible. If you don't find kitten, that's a bug. It's very rare.
