munching squares n.
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 LISP machine, 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.]