munching squares

A display hack dating back to the PDP-1 (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 - see HAKMEM items 146--148) 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 LISPMachine, 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". [This is a good example of the use of the

word foo as a metasyntactic variable.]