Cube

CUBE is a game played on the facing sides of a cube with a side dimension of 2. A location is designated by three numbers — e.g., 1, 2, 1. The object is to travel from 1, 1, 1 to 3, 3, 3 by moving one horizontal or vertical (not diagonal) square at a time without striking one of 5 randomly placed landmines. You are staked to $500; prior to each play of the game you may make a wager whether you will reach your destination. You lose if you hit a mine or try to make an illegal move — i.e., change more than one digit from your previous position.

Cube was created by Jerimac Ratliff of Fort Worth, Texas.

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As published in Basic Computer Games (1978):

• Atari Archives
• Annarchive

Downloaded from Vintage Basic at http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html

Porting Notes

(please note any difficulties or challenges in porting here)

Known Bugs

This program does very little validation of its input, enabling the user to cheat in two ways:

• One can enter a large negative wager, purposely lose, and gain that much money.
• One can move outside the cube (using coordinates 0 or 4), then safely walk "around" the standard play volume to the destination square.

It's remotely possible that these are clever solutions the user is intended to find, solving an otherwise purely random game.

Randomization Logic

The BASIC code uses an interesting technique for choosing the random coordinates for the mines. The first coordinate is chosen like this:

380 LET A=INT(3*(RND(X)))
390 IF A<>0 THEN 410
400 LET A=3

where line 410 is the start of a similar block of code for the next coordinate. The behaviour of RND(X) depends on the value of X. If X is greater than zero then it returns a random value between 0 and 1. If X is zero it returns the last random value generated, or 0 if no value has yet been generated.

If X is 1, therefore, the first line above set A to 0, 1, or 2. The next 2 lines replace a 0 with a 3. The replacement values varies for the different coordinates with the result that the random selection is biased towards a specific set of points. If X is 0, the RND calls all return 0, so the coordinates are the known. It appears that this technique was probably used to allow testing the game with a well-known set of locations for the mines. However, in the code as it comes to us, the value of X is never set and is thus 0, so the mine locations are never randomized.

The C# port implements the biased randomized mine locations, as seems to be the original intent, but includes a command-line switch to enable the deterministic execution as well.