Researchers find mystery hidden in early 80's Atari game

wired_parrot writes: Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it’s largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game’s source code to investigate how it was made. An early maze-navigating game, Entombed intrigued the researchers for how early programmers solved the problem of drawing a solvable maze that is drawn procedurally.

But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain (Link to full paper). The fundamental logic that the determines how the maze is drawn is locked in a table of possible values written in the games code. However, it seems the logic behind the table has been lost forever.