ToonTalk Birds and their Nests

Birds and their Nests

A Picture of a bird

Inside of Tooly you'll find a very large stack of nests. If you take one out you'll see an egg in the nest. If you set it down, out will hatch a bird. A bird likes to take everything she's been given and put it on her nest. Even if her nest has been moved to some other part of the city, she'll find it. One quirky thing about birds is they only like things that are rectangular. She takes number and text pads, pictures, and boxes - nothing else. Luckily, lots of other things go into boxes. She will even take a box with the nests of other birds or even a box with other birds in it. If she wants to put something in her nest and something is already there, she'll put the new thing on the bottom of the stack of things already there.

After bringing something to their nest, birds return to where they were before.

You can use Pumpy to make a bird very large and drop a picture on her T-shirt. If it fits completely inside her shirt, it is now stuck to her T-shirt. You can also type while holding a bird to put text on her T-shirt. You can also put a label on a nest by typing while holding the nest. SHOW ME

FOR ADVANCED USERS:

Bird copies. If you use your Magic Wand to copy a bird then both birds think the same nest is theirs. But it's not really a problem. They'll share the nest just fine. Computer scientists call this many-to-one communication.

Nest copies. If you use the wand to copy a nest and then give the bird that hatched in that nest something, then the bird has a problem. She thinks both nests are hers and wants to bring what she's been given to both nests. She manages this by copying herself and what she's holding. This way a copy gets delivered to each nest. The new copies of the bird fly away after they've delivered their package. Computer scientists call this one-to-many communication or multi-casting. If you also copy the bird you get many-to-many communication. SHOW ME

Bird and nest copies. If you copy something that contains both a bird and her nest then the copy has a new bird and a new nest. The new bird thinks the new nest is hers and the old bird doesn't notice the new nest.

Combining nests. A nest can be dropped on another nest. Bammer will smash them together and birds of either nest will now fly to the combined nest. SHOW ME Beginning with Beta 48 or version 3.152 (or product version 3), this has been made to consistently follow these rules if nest A is dropped on nest B: (1) anything that would have been delivered to nest A shows up on nest B instead and (2) copies of whatever is delivered to nest B are delivered to any copies made of the result of smashing nests A and B together. Note that the birds of nest A will not deliver to copies of nest B that were made before being smashed together nor to copies made subsequently to earlier copies of nest B. Diagrams illustrating this can be found here.

Long-distance birds. Birds can fly over a network to nests on other computers.

Creating a new nest when loaded. If a bird is saved while its nest is in Dusty or has been destroyed then when loaded the bird will create a new nest.

Creating a new egg when a nest is loaded. If a nest is saved without any of its birds then when loaded a fresh egg will be in the nest and a new bird will hatch.

Advanced tip. If a robot is expecting something in a box and there's a nest there instead, the robot will wait around hoping that the bird will cover her nest with what he's looking for. Computer scientists call this process synchronization. This is a great way to get robots in different houses to work together and exchange messages. Click for an example of a bunch of robots who work together to figure out prime numbers. SHOW ME