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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 …
Previous post in topic Nex post in topic First post in topic Table of contents It’s Monday morning. I’m sitting at my desk, using my fingers to hit keys in more or less the right order. I’m using 26 letters to construct words and sentences in order to convey my meaning. Well, 26 letters, and …