Odd book

Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
Sun May 10 01:04:36 CDT 2020


The Martin Gardner column about teaching matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe 
was March 1962 Scientific American, "Mathematical Games: How to build a 
game-learning machine and then teach it to play and to win"


In the novel "The Adolescence of P-1", by Thomas Joseph Ryan (1977), a 
college kid, fascinated by that article, implements an open-ended version 
on an IBM 360/30 at Waterloo [remember WATFOR?], with a goal of cracking 
additional machines through telecommunications links, and installing 
itself.
It is, of course, unrealistic fiction to think that such a system could 
be implemented on 1970s 360s.  with less than 4GB.  Besides, Windows 
security is too good for it to install itself on modern systems.

oolcay itay




More information about the cctech mailing list