The Munching Square is a display hack

Display hack

A display hack is a computer program with similar purpose to a kaleidoscope: to make pretty pictures . Famous display hacks include munching squares and smoking clover. Some display hacks can be also implemented by creating text files which contain numerous escape sequences for a text terminal to...

 dating back to the PDP-1

PDP-1

The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...

 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later (re)discovered on the LISP machine, have been christened munching triangles (try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), munching w's, and munching mazes. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on a display terminal, and does it using a relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as munching foos.

External links

• Video of the original Munching Squares demo running on a PDP-1
• Munching Squares at MathWorld
  MathWorld
  MathWorld is an online mathematics reference work, created and largely written by Eric W. Weisstein. It is sponsored by and licensed to Wolfram Research, Inc. and was partially funded by the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library grant to the University of Illinois at...