Agathon Group - "The Good Stuff"

Real Life Tron

by Alan Ritari on October 7, 2008 9:29 PM.

In a cool story of art imitating [artificial] life, programmer Daniel Wellman describes his Tron game in which “lightcycles” battle in an arena, forcing each other to crash into walls. In the 1982 movie on which the game is based, a lightcycle breaks through an arena wall to escape and run wild (hope I didn’t just ruin the movie for anyone).

In the game version, a programming bug… allows lightcycles to escape and run wild through the computer’s RAM, causing spectacular system crashes. I can only imagine their profound shock when they realized their software was flawed in exactly the same way as the movie’s villainous Master Control Program.

A geeky read, but entertaining to the core.