Language

RUBE is a tribute to Rube Goldberg, creator of all those unique cartoon contrivances, showed the world that anything can be done in a more complicated fashion than necessary.

The language itself is a cellular "bully" automaton: certain state transitions force other, non-adjacent cells to assume certain state transitions. Although this may sound like an interesting notion, the number of interactions climbs quickly as more objects are added, and things get much messier than they normally would in a regular cellular automaton, like John Conway's Game of Life.

Also unlike a real cellular automaton, RUBE supports rudimentary output functionality; input was planned, but has never been implemented.

REDGREEN is an updated version of the RUBE universe, one which is expressible as a proper cellular automaton.

John Colagioia has created a more consistent version of the RUBE language, RUBE II: Das Klickenklacker.

Implementation

You can download the RUBE distribution from this web server. It contains C source code, documentation, and a precompiled binary for MS-DOS.

You can also download John's RUBE II distribution from this web server. Strangely enough it also contains C source code, documentation, and a precompiled binary for MS-DOS.

Documentation

See rube.txt for the original description of the interpreter, klik.txt for RUBE II.

Programs

Attempting to write anything even approaching a single "Turing-power" in this language is an utter nightmare. Partly this is because the playfield in the available implementation is restricted to 80 columns by 25 rows. But mostly it's just because programming anything non-trivial in RUBE is a clumsy job of co-oridnating concurrently operating sections of the playfield.