Download the original BASIC code. Check out the original page the text below was taken from in the Book.
Instructions From the Book
Hurkle? A Hurkle is a happy beast and lives in another galaxy on a planet named Lirht that has three moons. Hurkle favorite pets of the Gwik., the dominant race of Lirht and . . . well, to find out more, read "The Hurkle is a Happy Beast," a story in the book A Way Home by Theodore Sturgeon.
In this program a shy hurkle is hiding on a 10 by 10 grid. Homebase is point 0,0 in the Southwest corner. Your guess as to the gridpoint where the hurkle is hiding should be a pair of whole numbers, separated by a comma. After each try, the computer will tell you the approximate direction to go look for hte Hurkle. You get five guesses to find him; you may change this number in Line 110, although four guesses is actually enough.
This program was written by Bob Albrecht of People's Computer Company.
Modifications For This Version
This one is almost identical to the version in the book. You get 5 guesses, and the grid goes from 0 to 10. With each guess the computer tells you which direction to go. Being a web page, the user input is managed with a web form rather than the command line. Other than that, however, this is true to its roots.
One addition, however, to this version, is a visual grid of the Hurkle world. Once the game is over the grid shows where the Hurkle is hiding. Another addition is the ability to change the grid size. It can be anything from 5 to 40 max. The only reason it doesn't allow larger than 40 is because there isn't enough room to display a grid bigger than that.
Lastly, I have added the feature to calculate how many guesses the use is allowed based on the grid size. For a 5 x 5 grid, 5 guesses is too many, but for a 40 x 40, more than 5 guesses may be required.
Technical Stuff
This is written in PHP, and thus uses post and session variables to manage everything. I chose PHP because it allows the hurkle data to truly be hidden, and prevents prying eyes from peaking at the code in a JavaScript version to discover the hurkle's hiding place.
Good Luck . . .
Enjoy Hurkle!
Hurkle
A Hurkle is hiding on a 10 by 10 grid. Homebase on the grid is point 0, 0 and any gridpoint is a pair of whole numbers separated by a comma. Try to guess the Hurkle's gridpoint. You get 5 tries. After each try, I will tell you the approximate direction to go to look for the Hurkle.