''robotfindskitten'' (''rfk'') is a "

Zen Zen (; from Chinese: ''Chán''; in Korean: ''Sŏn'', and Vietnamese: ''Thiền'') is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that developed in China during the Tang dynasty by blending Indian Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Yogacara and Madhyamaka phil ...

simulation", originally written by Leonard Richardson for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

Game

''robotfindskitten'' is a free video game with an

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

interface in which the user (playing the eponymous

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

and represented by a

number sign The symbol is known as the number sign, hash, (or in North America) the pound sign. The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a Typographic ligature, ligatured abbre ...

"") must find kitten (represented by a random character) on a field of other random characters. Walking up to items allows robot to identify them as either kitten, or any of a variety of "Non-kitten Items" (NKIs) with whimsical, strange or simply random text descriptions. It is not possible to lose (though there is
patch
that adds a 1 in 10 probability of the NKI killing robot). Simon Carless has characterized ''robotfindskitten'' as "less a game and more a way of life ... It's fun to wander around until you find a kitten, at which point you feel happy and can start again". The original ''robotfindskitten'' program was the sole entrant to a contest in 1997 at the now-defunct webzine '' Nerth Pork'' — the object: create a depiction of "robotfindskitten". The concept was originally created by Jacob Berendes, but the only submission he received depicted kittens meeting an untimely end at the hands of malevolent robots. When the author rewrote the program for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

in 1999, it gained popularity and now has its own website and

mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contra ...

s. Since then, it has been ported to and/or implemented on over 30 platforms, including

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

, the

Dreamcast The is the final home video game console manufactured by Sega. It was released in Japan on November 27, 1998, in North America on September 9, 1999 and in Europe on October 14, 1999. It was the first sixth-generation video game console, prec ...

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is a discontinued mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. ...

TI-99/4A The TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A are home computers released by Texas Instruments (TI) in 1979 and 1981, respectively. Based on TI's own TMS9900 microprocessor originally used in minicomputers, the TI-99/4 was the first 16-bit home computer. The assoc ...

, the

Z-machine The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code ...

, the Sony PSP, Android, and many more. Graphical versions, such as an

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

version with emblazoned on an otherwise featureless cube, also exist. Remakes of it are also used as programming tutorials, such as for

Gambas Gambas is an object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language, and an integrated development environment that accompanies it. Designed to run on Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems, its name is a recursive acronym for ...

References

External links

*{{cite web, url=http://robotfindskitten.org/, title=''robotfindskitten''... helping robots find kittens since 1997, publisher=robotfindskitten.org, accessdate=2014-06-09
''robotfindskitten'' in a Java appletFictional Back-story to the game, detailing robot's creation"The Ultimate ''robotfindskitten'' Fan Site"
on the original author's web site 1997 video games Amiga games Android (operating system) games Apple II games Commodore 64 games DOS games Dreamcast homebrew games Game Boy Advance games Free and open-source Android software Java platform games Linux games Open-source video games Palm OS games Unix games Video games developed in the United States Video games with textual graphics ZX Spectrum games