I actually did reverse engineer Keen 5 and put together a playable version for Win/Mac/Linux.
It was quite a lot of work, though the Commander Keen community had already done a lot of reverse engineering
and a few people pitched in, so it wasn't nearly as much work as I'd feared.

The source code for the original games, of course, has been found and (lawyers permitting) will be GPLed, so I've not put much more work into the reimplementation.

Binaries: http://davidgow.net/keen/omnis...
Code: https://github.com/sulix/omnis...

(I've also started work on an updated port of Keen Dream based on the source release, though it isn't working yet: http://davidgow.net/keen/omnis... )

I can think of a number of follow-on experiments to tell us more about this mechanic.

First I think you'd want to establish more conclusively that it is counting or memory of steps or actions, and not something in the environment:
- Replace the sand behind them on their path and see whether they can still get back.
- Put them on a treadmill to get to their location and back so that their aren't actually moving relative to the earth and see whether they still get back.
- Once this get to the food, rotate the artificial section of ground it is on 180 degrees and see whether they still get back.
- Change the wind direction in an artificial environment and see whether they can still get back.
- Reverse the location of the primary light source in an artificial environment and see whether they can still get back.

Then explore the limits of the counting or action memory mechanism:
- Keep extending the number of steps to get to food until they can't remember how many steps to get back.
- Keep extending the number of steps in a path with a turn in it, on each side of the turn, and compare to the path with no turn.

<quote>
<li>Toothpaste. Now was that Crest Tartar Control plus Whitening, or Crest Whitening plus Tartar Control? And did you want that in paste or gel? I swear, we need meta-toothpaste, where it's formulated on the spot. You have a big board with all sorts of shit like "mint," "sparkly" (for the child or man-child in your household), "tartar control," and buzzword of the year, "whitening." Then you push a whole bunch and hit the <b>MIX</b> button, and get a toothpaste tube with all that shit custom-made. It'd be like ordering an HP server; it'd even warn you about compatibility issues! But I digress.</li></quote>

That is actually a great idea. Some machine in Walmart, big Crest logo. Pick your flavour, features, gel/paste, etc. Give it a name and it mixes it, puts it into a tube, prints your name on there, and you're done! You should probably patent the idea, I'm pretty sure it's marketable.

Sounds like Anne Poole.

http://qntm.org/?ashmore

That is all.

Scale that down to ~half: e = 0.5*m*v^2

(Assuming relativistic effects are ignored, of course).

Either way, 30 kWh is ridiculous. You'd need the plates to move quite a bit.

Well, at least he got something right -- the name.
Microsoft Bob is certainly comical -- It's one of the biggest jokes around.

Except perhaps ME and Vista.

It's better to say touche. Touché is too cliche.

Will we have to post live now, just in case posting from home isn't accepted?

Steam Cloud != Steamworks (Steam Cloud may be a _part_ of Steamworks, but they're not the same thing)