JoeDaDude

Another small tidbit of lost computer history: The first person who lost a game to a computer was an unnamed Los Alamos laboratory assistant who lost a game of simplified chess against a computer program in 1956 [1]. The assistant's name seems to be lost to time.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_chess#Los_Alamos_tr...

This nostalgia trio reminded me of the article claiming a long, previous-to-MAD history of Alfred E. Neuman.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/03/a-boy-with-no...

The Spomenik Database for those inclined to learn a bit more:

https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/

Casual trivia: The film Last and First Men consists primarily of slow pans of Spomeniks.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8015444/

"...an ordinary 19th century family’s one book beyond the Bible (thousands of years old) might be Pilgrim’s Progress (about two hundred years old)." I think that is part of the reason speech has changed. I am reminded of this snippet of dialog in the film True Grit. The language used sounds so archaic, even though the fictitious event is just over a century and a half old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMPr9rchJMs

What about commercial use rights? Could I use a song I created in a for-profit manner, say a soundtrack to an indie film or a youtube channel?

But isn't it the case that there is typically no personnel at the silo (or Launch Facility LF) itself? Instead, the Missile wing Commanders at the Launch Control Centers (LCC) some distance away. The LCC commands some number of LFs remotely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_launch_control_center

Correction. The actual Kaguya-sama link is this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqjFmsZGBSc

Something very similar was done a while ago by Petar Gyurov:

https://petargyurov.com/bookshelf/

Rotoscopeing in anime examples.

Flowers of Evil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toc9x19Cmkg

Kaguya-sama Love is War scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toc9x19Cmkg

There is the case of Blondie24, an evolutionary neural net, or genetic algorithm, which was able to develop a very strong checkers-playing capability by self-play with no human instruction. It was later extended to paly other games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondie24

I was intrigued not so much by the TFA but about the painting used to illustrate it. That figure behind the two chess players is not a devil as typically depicted, it is instead an angel, a symbol of heaven and almost the exact opposite of an evil devil. Instead, the devil, Mephistopheles, is the player on the left.

It seems the artist, Moritz Retzsch, painted several versions of this image [1]. The painting(s) have gone by several names, such as "The Chess Players", "The Game of Life", or "Checkmate". More interesting is the story that a grandmaster examined the painting and discovered that the player on the right, looking defeated and forlorn, can still win the game! I have not verified this, but the story goes that the grandmaster demanded the gallery change the name of the painting from "Checkmate" to something else [2].

[1]. https://www.one-more-move-chess-art.com/MoritzRetzsch.html

[2]. https://haventoday.org/blog/closer-look-checkmate/

Another example was put out by the DIY synthesizer kit company PAIA [1]. They had a patch notation system in which control voltages and connections were represented vertically and sound signal flow and processing was represented horizontally. The system was presented in a small booklet called The Source, which I have been unable to locate online, except for a photo of it with a PAIA synth [2].

The Source diagrams resemble the Figure 4 example by Allen Strange in TFA.

[1]. https://paia.com/

[2]. https://www.matrixsynth.com/2012/02/1981-paia-4700-modular.h...

I think it is a safe bet that they are mostly computer games by now, though there is a long history of using board games for training. That said, there was Freedom of Information Act request to uncover some of the games Mr. Rhunke developed for the CIA and they turned out to be physical board games.

The military has a long history of using war games for training, going all the way back to Kriegspiel [1]. At least one history book [2], has been written about the topic. However it is rare that these military training games make it outside of their domain and become available to the general public. A rare exception may be the games designed by Volko Ruhnke [3], who designed games for training the CIA (though these may not be war games per se, but rather games about complex geopolitical situations). Mr. Rhunke's experience led him to become a highly successful commercial game designer.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel

[2]. The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists by Peter P. Perla (Author), R. Dawn Sollars (Illustrator)

[3]. https://spyscape.com/article/meet-the-cia-spy-who-creates-wa...

I still have a couple of Invisiclues hint books. I wonder if the special markers are still available and if they would still work on these old books.

I am reminded of a short scene in the film Goya's Ghosts, where the artists claims to charge more if the portrait he is painting includes one or two hands.

An omitted use case for the Affordable and Massively Used category of multi-rotor drones: Drone light shows. These are starting to replace fireworks shows as the latter bring up safety and fire hazard concerns.

The film Fair Game is about CIA analyst Valerie Plame and how she was shut out when decisions about WMD presence were made.

I find it (a tiny bit) helpful to create a mind map of all my various interests. In doing do I realized that many are closely related, for example, AI coding is adjacent to shortwave radio as both are on a technology branch. Other branches could be the arts, history, languages, etc, This helps me feel that I am not neglecting some interests, I'm just focusing on different aspects of it for now and I can rest assured I'll look at other branches in due time. https://www.mindmup.com/

I'm surprised online gambling sites haven't started a poo; for people to pick the actual date of the blast.

Agreed, One niche interest of mine is his treatment of board games and the machines he built to play them.

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-the...

An Introduction to Information Theory Symbols, Signals & Noise By John Robinson Pierce

https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Introduction_to_Info...

A silly question and a PSA:

1. There was a two-player game called The Immigration Game [1] using GoL rules. Has anyone actually played this? Even better, has anyone developed an AI to play it? Is there really much of a game there?

2. The PSA: The Immigration Game was described in Lifeline, a 1970's era (typewritten!) newsletter about GoL. I managed to obtain a set of them. I've been planning to scan them and make them available online. I don't think there is any ground breaking info in them, after all, folk were programming on mainframes (surreptitiously).

[1]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129088/the-immigration-g...

Decades ago, I read an article in Byte magazine discussing various implementations of GoL. The article ended with an implementation in one line of APL. What are the chances you (or anyone) still has that article, and that one line program?

An excellent film about his life and work has been made: In the Realms of the Unreal [1]. Oddly not mentioned in the article (or did I miss it?)

[1]. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390123/

Not to be nitpicky (well, maybe a little)...

El Ajedrecista [1], a chess machine designed by Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo in in 1912 and later improved in 1915, defeated chess Grandmaster Savielly Tartakower in 1951 [2], a few years earlier than the unnamed lab assistant who lost to Los Alamos Chess. This would make Savielly the first human player defeated in a chess-like game. The lab assistant loss must have occurred sometime after 1956.

To be fair, El Ajedrecista played a very limited game, only capable of playing a white king and rook against a black king moved by a human opponent. Still, I think it qualifies as a "chess like game"

As a matter of casual trivia, El Ajedrecista inspired Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, to build his own chess machine [3], which he named Caissac (after the goddess of chess Caissa [4]) in 1950.

[1]. https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista

[3]. https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-man-who-built-the-che...

[4]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa

"....[6502 and 8080] simulators were written in APL".

Now THAT would be software to behold. No mention by the author as to whether the code of these emulators still exist.

For folk interested in learning more about what historians and similar think of the novel, a compilation of essays on the subject titled "Learning from SHOGUN: Japanese History and Western Fantasy" has been made available courtesy of the compilation's editor, Henry Smith.:

https://www.columbia.edu/~hds2/learning/

I am not the Lazy programmer nor the owner of this website, but titular Lazy Programmer has developed several roadmaps of the courses they offer for those who wish to learn AI/ML. You don't necessarily have to take their courses, but you can glean the topics of the courses from their titles and get a good idea of what you need to know.

The courses:

https://lazyprogrammer.me/deep-learning-courses/

The order in which to take the courses:

https://deeplearningcourses.com/course_order

A video summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAdA2t2Xmm0

This was the basis for the film Charly [1] (disclaimer: I've read the story but have not seen the film).

[1[]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charly_(1968_film)