Wumpus

In a flurry of activity, I’ve added yet another game.  This time the classic “Hunt the Wumpus‘.  It’s fairly faithful to the basic version, though the numbering of the rooms is different (still a dodecahedron though.)  For those not familiar with the game, you are an intrepid explorer in a cave with 20 interconnected rooms.  In some other room there resides a horrible (though usually very sleepy) beast known as a Wumpus, and it’s your job to kill it.  The cave is also home to bats (which carry you off to a random room) and deep pits where you will fall to your death.  To aid you in your quest, you have 5 crooked arrows, that can each fly through up to 5 rooms (if you can map out that far ahead.) If you fire and miss however, the wumpus wakes up and might move to an adjacent room, possibly the one you’re in–a fatal mistake. Wandering into the room with the wumpus is also sometimes fatal, though you usually just scare it off.

I’ve always had a soft spot for this game–it may be the first computer game I played.  I first played this game on a mainframe at my father’s work when I was about 7 years old.  At the time it seemed cool, though almost impossibly difficult.  Now it seems much easier, though I have the benefit of a map and better skills.

The game would actually be very fun and playable if not the the abysmal recognition accuracy I’m getting from the pocketsphinx STT engine.  It consistently mishears ‘shoot’ as ‘eight’, and ‘two’ as ‘ten’, making certain situations very frustrating.  I have three solutions in mind.  First, train the pocketsphinx engine.  Second, toss it out in favor of an online STT engine like wit.ai or Google.  Third, and possibly the most appropriate for the phone, I could replace the voice input of numbers with using the dial on the phone, though this may prove equally frustrating to use in practice.

Sample test game after the break. 

In room 2 there are passages to rooms 1, 5 and 18 and you hear bats nearby
You move to room 18 and a bat carries you off to room 10
In room 10 there are passages to rooms 5, 9 and 17 and you can smell the wumpus
shooting at 5
You fire your arrow, it flies to room 5, you hear the wumpus move and you have 4 arrows left
In room 10 there are passages to rooms 5, 9 and 17
You move to room 17
In room 17 there are passages to rooms 10, 16 and 18, you hear bats nearby and you can smell the wumpus
shooting at 16
You fire your arrow, it flies to room 16 and finds its mark, striking the wumpus down!
Your game is over because you killed the Wumpus!

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