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Retired engineer discovers 55-year-old bug in Lunar Lander computer game code
A physics simulation flaw in text-based 1969 computer game went unnoticed until today.
The legendary game—which Storer developed on a PDP-8 minicomputer in a programming language called FOCAL just months after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic moonwalks—allows players to control a lunar module's descent onto the Moon's surface. Fast forward to 2024, when Martin—an AI expert, game developer, and former postdoctoral associate at MIT—stumbled upon a bug in Storer's high school code while exploring what he believed was the optimal strategy for landing the module with maximum fuel efficiency—a technique known among Kerbal Space Program enthusiasts as the "suicide burn." Intrigued by the anomaly, Martin dug into the game's source code and discovered that the landing algorithm was based on highly sophisticated physics for its time, including the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation and a Taylor series expansion.
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