The Robot King of Interactive Google Doodles

If you haven't already, visit Google.pl, where a mesmerizing Doodle honoring Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem will joyfully consume at least 20 minutes of your day. Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Lem's first but lesser known novel, The Astronauts, the black-and-white, pencil-sketched interactive Doodle is epic. To call it a Doodle is almost selling it short. It's basically a mini video game that takes you through some simple mathematical problems and challenges in order to build a giant robot. Spoiler: When you beat the game, the robot explodes and you're left with the results of a (Polish) Google search for Stanislaw Lem. Clicking a question-mark button next to the Doodle reveals a message (in Polish) crediting Daniel Mroz for the drawings, inspired by Lem's short story collection The Cyberiad, an internationally acclaimed series about a universe of robots with the occasional appearance of human 'palefaces'. To check out all of the sprites -- a computer graphics term roughly equivalent to frames in an animation -- go to this page, compiled by The Wall Street Journal's Jeremy Singer-Vine.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.