Previous post in topic First post in topic Table of contents Adding by subtracting There won’t be posts after this one on this thing for a couple of weeks. I must navigate the dangerous, relative infested waters of the holidays. I need to be able to show that the way we program our machine can …
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The perceptron In 1957, Frank Rosenblatt came up with the perceptron. The perceptron is a simple neural network that was able to recognize simple shapes. Unfortunately, Rosenblatt got a little over excited, and made over inflated statements about what his perceptron would be able to do. After the 1969 publication of Marvin Minsky and Seymour …
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Tierra, bits bytes and life In the early 1990/s, a biologist named Thomas Ray created a computer program that acted like a computer infected with many little programs. He called it Tierra, Spanish for “Earth.” The little programs could, and did, mutate, self-replicate, and evolve in strange and wonderful ways. Here’s the home page for …
Previous post in topic Next post in topic First post in topic Table of contents There seems to be a tradeoff. On the one hand, you can have a complicated machine, and easy programming. On the other, you can have a simple machine, but the programming gets weird and obscure.
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Core Wars In 1984, the game Core Wars was written and introduced to the public. Contestants write programs in a special language called redcode, and attempt to halt or overwrite the other programs in order to be the last game standing. Here’s a beginner’s guide to redcode The beginners’ guide to Redcode Here is a …
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Darwin, the game In the summer of 1961, a game was created. It was a programming game. Players would write programs that would compete against one another to try and copy themselves as often as possible, and attempt to deactivate the other programs. Here are a couple of links with more information on the game. …
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Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet I wanted to do something special for episode 100. It snuck up on me, and I never figured out what to do. I decided to share a couple of other projects, outside of the podcast. One is a blog series I’m working on, about how computers compute. The other is …
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256 simpler games In the 1980/s, Stephen Wolfram began considering and experimenting with elementary cellular automata. These are, instead of a 2-dimensional grid, just a one-dimensional row of cells or squares. At least one of these simpler games, rule 110, turns out to be Turing complete, just like Conway’s game of life. Here are links …