donkey kong

lynne doodles

Years ago, Spouse got offered a promotion. It was a great opportunity: career advancement, a raise, upskilling... Only problem: it would require us to move to Detroit.

At the time we had been in Chicago for a little over a year and we were both in love (still are! we're simps for this city). It's just a perfect match for our values and our lifestyle: it's beautiful, it's comfortable, it's easy to move around without a car, we have good friends here.

We really didn't want to move. So Spouse rejected the promotion. The company still pushed for it, offered different incentives, Spouse explained moving out of Chicago was a dealbreaker.

So the company invited both of us to Detroit. We would spend a couple of days there, being wined and dined, exploring the city. They would show us around so we could see that Detroit was very similar to Chicago and that we would surely be as happy there as we were here. They arranged for our accommodation and a car rental.

In which they accidentally let the riff-raff into their exclusive club

Pac-Man uses a software-based random number generator. I made a video all about it, which you can check out below. The game uses it only to determine what directions frightened ghosts move throughout the maze.

I feel like I've referenced this video once already...

Ms. Pac-Man reuses that same random number generator for the same purpose. However, it also has another source of randomness that it uses for a few other purposes. Today we'll look at one of them! This slight modification changed how top-level players play the game, and why you don't see any "perfect games" of Ms. Pac-Man.