Rog-O-Matic is a bot developed in 1984 that plays the computer game

Personal computer game

A PC game, also known as a computer game, is a video game played on a personal computer, rather than on a video game console or arcade machine...

 Rogue

Rogue (computer game)

Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content. Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading...

.

Described as a "belligerent expert system

Expert system

In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the procedure of a developer as is the case in...

", Rog-O-Matic performs well when tested against expert Rogue players, even winning the game. Because all information in Rogue is communicated to the player via ASCII text, Rog-O-Matic has automatic access to the same information a human player has. The program is still the subject of some scholarly interest; a 2005 paper said:
One of Rog-O-Matic's authors, Michael Loren Mauldin

Michael Loren Mauldin

Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin is the founder and chief scientist of the Lycos Internet search engine company. He developed the Lycos Search Engine while working on the Informedia Digital Library project at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also, Director of Conversive, Inc...

, would go on to write the Lycos

Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

 search engine.

External links

• Archive of Rogue and Rog-O-Matic source code.