Jackass

a game by John Higgins

based on ANIMAL by Arthur Luehrmann

Version 2 for Windows9x or later, February 2003.

JACKASS is a new version for Windows of the ANIMAL game which first came into being in the 1970s. In ANIMAL you play a guessing game against the computer; you think of an animal and the computer tries to guess what it is. At the start the computer is likely to lose since it only knows about eagles and elephants; everything that isn't an eagle is an elephant and vice versa. However, each time it loses it asks you to teach it about your animal, so that it gradually learns more and more. JACKASS adds a new twist to the original ANIMAL game, since it writes little paragraphs incorporating what it has learned. You can teach it about four different categories: living creatures, transport, food, and people, or you can create your own new categories. When you read the program's mini-essays, you can switch on or off some of its grammar rules, allowing you to examine the way it adds endings to verbs and the way it links sentences using AND, OR or BUT.

This version is being released as freeware. It was originally written to support a small research project conducted by Momodou Njie at the University of Stirling in 1999, since when it has been improved by extending the set of categories and the types of question allowed, and by allowing the program's essays to be printed to file. It also has a much fuller help system than version 1 from 1999.

Download the full version if you have no other programs on your system created with Microsoft Visual Basic version 5. Otherwise the short version should install and run correctly. I am told that the program runs properly on a Windows emulator for Macintosh, such as Virtual PC, but not, of course, on the standard Macintosh OS.

Please send feedback or report any bugs or problems to

marlodge1--at--wordscape.net
(Replace --at-- with @ when mailing and use subject line: Jackass-report.)

John Higgins, Shaftesbury, 12 January, 2007.