Black Box (game)

The game can also be played with pen and paper, and there are numerous computer implementations for many different platforms, including one which can be run from the Emacs text editor.

Black Box was inspired by the work of Godfrey Hounsfield who was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his invention of the CAT scanner.

The object of the game is to discover the location of objects ("atoms", represented by metal balls in the Waddingtons game and by yellow balls in the Parker Brothers version) hidden within the grid, by the use of the minimum number of probes ("rays").

In a solitaire game, they are either hidden by a computer or they are pre-hidden; in this case, the results of various probes are resolved by looking them up in a book.

The seeker designates where the ray enters the black box and the hider (or computer or book) announces the result (a "hit", "reflection", or "detour"/"miss").

This result is marked by the seeker, who uses these to deduce the position of the atoms in the black box.

A beam is "fired" into one of these positions and the result is used to help deduce the location of a known number of hidden atoms.

Thus, ray 1 fired into the box configuration at left strikes an atom directly, generating a "hit", designated by an "H".

The interaction resulting from a ray which does not actually hit an atom, but which passes directly to one side of the ball is called a "deflection".

The complete set of interactions of rays with the original sample black box is shown at left.

Note that for detours, the input and output locations are interchangeable - it does not matter if ray 2 below enters the box from the left side, or the top.

When the seeker guesses the location of the atoms in the grid, each misidentified atom position costs penalty points: ten in the original Waddingtons rules, five in the Parker Brothers version and most computer editions.