We have wired up a child's motorised toy hamster to a programmable wireless controller which enables us to send short instruction sequences to it. The hamster can move and turn (but not both at the same time). It can also drop a trail of pellets as it moves. The hamster is able to receive instructions which are encoded using a 3-bit coding system:
- (0) 000 = idle, do nothing
- (1) 001 = turn left by 90°
- (2) 010 = turn right by 90°
- (3) 011 = move forward by 50 mm
- (4) 100 = ignored
- (5) 101 = enable pellet dropping activity
- (6) 110 = disable pellet dropping activity
- (7) 111 = stop all further movements until device is physically reset
So for example, programming it with the octal sequence 22227 would cause the hamster to turn around by 360°. Sending the sequence 5362325367 would result in an '=' sign being formed from the pellets.
We have filled the hamster with sufficient pellets and programmed it with the following octal sequence:
00006333 22533133 13323323 36223331 53333623 15362231 35332332 33133133 63133225 33133133 13323323 36233331 31536223 13153333 62353323 32336223 32533233 22633331 53333622 33132253 32336113 33332333 00000000 00000000 33333333 31536231 53333613 31533336 23332253 31331332 33233226 33315362 23131533 33263533 23323313 31336353 31331332 33233233 61323313 37444444.
The cache is not at the published coordinates. The pellet trail will lead to some coordinates at which the final cache is located.
