Playing chess brought back memories

© Mark Ollig

Alan Turing asked the audience during a lecture Feb. 20, 1947, at the London Mathematical Society, if a machine could learn to play chess.

Turing discussed the possibility of an electronic device capable of playing a human in a game of chess.

“Intelligent Machinery” is the title of a report Alan Turing authored in 1948.

“I propose to investigate the question as to whether it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behavior,” reads the first sentence of the report.

As I read through Turing’s report, he addressed peoples’ uneasiness and fear when considering a machine reasoning and processing information like a human.

Turing admits that constructing an intelligent machine might be considered by many to be going against others’ religious beliefs.

Questions arose whether Turing endorsed creating intelligence in a machine more prominent than that within a human.

Some people felt threatened, fearing future intelligent mechanical devices would dominate human existence like in a science fiction novel.

Turing acknowledges the apprehensions and uneasiness about thinking machines and says intelligence is an emotional state rather than a mathematical one.

We need to remember Turing was speaking during the late 1940s when mechanical devices completed tedious, repetitive tasks.

Turing described how one piece of new computing machinery, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), can quickly compute large numbers with no failures.

He may have been trying to evaluate the computer’s logical processing ability and its similarity to how the human brain solves problems.

Turing said some people feel intelligence in machinery would reflect its creator.

He counters this by comparing it with a discovery independently made by a student, being credited to the teacher.

Turing said while the teacher would be pleased with how his teaching method helped the student discover, the teacher would not take credit for the discovery.

The “Intelligent Machinery” report presents concerns we are still addressing today regarding autonomous artificial intelligence.

Turing writes about people using chess-playing “paper machines.”

“Playing against such a machine gives a definite feeling that one is pitting one’s wits against something alive,” Turing wrote.

To his statement, I recall Dec. 24, 1982, when our family celebrated Christmas Eve at my mother’s home in Winsted.

Her Christmas gift to me was the new digital computer chess system called Sensory Chess Challenger, which allows a human to play chess against a computer.

She knew I played many chess games with my father, who had died earlier in the year.

I recall many evenings sitting at the dining room table with my dad, each with our cup of coffee, strategizing while playing chess for hours.

We kept a record of wins and losses for fun, writing each game’s result on a piece of paper.

When the 1982 Christmas Eve festivities ended that evening, I drove back to my apartment, took the computer chess game console out of the box, and placed it on my kitchen table.

I plugged the chessboard into an AC outlet, set up the chess pieces, turned it on, and began playing chess against a computer for the first time.

I’ll admit, playing chess with a computer was an unusual experience.

I was surprised how the computer was strategically responding to each of my chess moves with eerily human-like intelligence.

The Sensory Chess Challenger was an excellent chess player, responding quickly to the moves I was making on the board.

While sitting at the table with my cup of coffee, I played quite a few games against the computer chess program.

Surprisingly, I managed to win a couple of games.

Playing computer chess that night felt like I was sitting across the chessboard from another person.

Of course, I remembered the many chess games with my dad.

Thanks, Mom, for the good memories your gift brought to me.

You can see a photo of the Sensory Chess Challenger at https://bit.ly/3iL4rfY.

Stay safe out there.

‘We were young, and we were risk-takers’

© Mark Ollig

Allan Alcorn designed the video game, Pong, when he was 24 years old and working as an Atari Inc. engineer.

Pong is the challenging table tennis (ping-pong) game we played on our television sets back in the 1970s.

In September 1972, Alcorn installed a standing cabinet version of the Pong video arcade game at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, CA.

Pong was an instant success and became regularly played by the bar patrons.

However, a couple of weeks after its installation, the Pong video arcade machine began having problems and stopped accepting quarters.

Much to the bar patrons’ dissatisfaction, the Pong game stood inoperative, and so the bar manager called Atari and said, “The machine is broken,” and asked to have someone come out and fix it.

When Alcorn decided to come out and investigate, he may have smiled after discovering why the Pong machine was not working.

Pong was so popular with the patrons that too many quarters had become jammed inside the cabinet’s coin-catcher, causing the machine’s mechanism to fail.

This story reminds me of the days when I was out repairing public payphones.

What’s a payphone, Grandpa?

Sometimes I’d find quarters, dimes, and nickels had become lodged inside the payphone’s coin chute assembly, causing the phone to become “out of order.”

I digress; back to today’s topic.

Nov. 29, 1972, Atari had obtained enough funding to announce the Pong video arcade cabinet games would be mass-produced on an assembly line and sold commercially.

Three years later, Atari released the home consumer version, called Home Pong, using a game console connected to a television.

In 1975, the Atari Home Pong console sold for $98.95, which in today’s dollars would be around $495.

Before Pong’s popularity, Ralph Baer had invented a simple “dot chasing” video game, called Chase, in 1967.

Playing the video game Chase requires a brown controller box connected to a television.

By 1972, Baer’s brown box developed into what became the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console.

The television maker Magnavox manufactured the Magnavox Odyssey game console; therefore, consumers reasoned the Odyssey console would only work on a Magnavox televisions when, in fact, it worked on any TV.

The attentive folks at Atari picked up on this false belief.

Atari began printing, “Works on any television set, black-and-white, or color” on all of its Pong game boxes in what I consider a brilliant advertising strategy. The result was increased sales of Pong game consoles among Magnavox television users.

Ralph Baer passed away Dec. 6, 2014, at age 92.

In 1958, William Higginbotham, an instrumentation division head at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, created a game played using an oscilloscope connected to an analog computer to entertain visitors at the laboratory.

Higginbotham called this game Tennis for Two.

You can see a 1983 video featuring Tennis for Two, using its original components, at https://bit.ly/35TmueN.

In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas wrote the OXO programming code (Xs and Os, or commonly called tic-tac-toe) video game at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Douglas used a 1949 EDSAC (electronic delay storage automatic calculator) British computer.

He wrote the programming code as part of his Ph.D. thesis on human-computer interaction.

OXO was the first computerized digital graphical game in which an individual played the tic-tac-toe game against a computer.

An individual used a rotary phone dial as the game controller when playing OXO.

What’s a rotary phone dial, Grandpa?

Dialing a digit from 1 to 9 represented the location of where to place an X or O on the tic-tac-toe board displayed on the computer’s cathode-ray tube (CRT) display screen.

Douglas’ human-computer interaction thesis earned him a Ph.D., which started his career in computer science.

World War II radar images were the inspiration for another game played using an electronic analog CRT.

Inventors Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed for a US Patent Jan. 25, 1947, for the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device and were granted US Patent 2,455,992 Dec. 14, 1948.

“In carrying out the invention, a cathode-ray tube [CRT display screen] is used upon the face of which the trace of the ray or electron beam can be seen. One or more targets, such as pictures of airplanes, for example, are placed upon the face of the tube. Controls are available to the player so that he can manipulate the trace or position of the beam, which is automatically caused to move across the face of the tube,” reads the text from their patent.

A player controlling “the trace of the ray or electron beam” on the display CRT emulates how the 1960 Etch A Sketch game creates the solid lines on its gray screen.

“At Atari, we were young, and we were risk-takers,” Allan Alcorn said during the 2015 Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences awards, where he and Ralph Baer (posthumously) were recipients of the Pioneer Award.

Today, Alcorn is 73 years old and lives in San Francisco.

Every once in a while, I still play Pong using the app on my smartphone.

Continue to stay safe out there.

Screen grab from the Pong app on my smartphone

We use it with every email

© Mark Ollig

 

Throughout the day, we find ourselves typing emails using the @ or “at sign.”

Where did this symbol originate? Who used this punctuation mark in the first email message, and what year did it occur?

In a New York Times blog, called The Lede, I read an article saying the first use of the @ symbol was in 1536.

Though I entered this world during the 1950s, even I know there wasn’t an email system 485 years ago during the Medieval period.

During the medieval years, people sending paper parchment correspondence used private messengers, including healthy and very physically fit relay-runners.

Riders upon horseback, mules, and donkeys carried attachments containing Medieval paper messages.

During the medieval period, most messages sent during times of war were “coded.”

In this case, the code is the messenger wearing an innocent disguise, hiding the message inside their clothing, shoe, or walking staff.

As a youth, I recall seeing the @ symbol used on signs at the local stores.

A sign on a shelf advertising a product would say, “5 cartons @ $1.99 each.”

The Italian newspaper “La Repubblica,” reported in 2000 that Giorgio Stabile, a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University in Rome, had found the @ symbol used in a Medieval merchant’s letter used for conducting commerce.

The letter containing the @ sign was by a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi.

Lapi used the @ in a hand-written letter he wrote May 4, 1536, to describe units of wine, called amphora, shipped in clay jars.

According to Stabile, Francesco Lapi’s letter sent from Seville, Spain, to a Rome colleague, described the cargo on the three ships that had just returned to Spain from Latin America.

“There, an amphora of wine, which is one 30th of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats,” Mr. Lapi wrote in his letter.

Lapi represented “amphora” with the letter “a” wrapped in its tail, appearing as the now-familiar @ sign.

The @ sign found its way onto typewriter keyboards as an accounting shorthand phrase meaning “at the price of.”

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer and computer programmer, used the @ symbol on his teletype keyboard, embedding the @ punctuation character in the first email address.

Using the @ symbol, he could send a mail message electronically to another computer system over the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

The ARPANET, as you know, is the predecessor of today’s internet.

Tomlinson developed his unique @host email system by combining the computer programs SNDMSG, a local inter-user mail program, with CPYNET, an experimental file transfer program.

Asked why he chose the @ sign, Tomlinson replied, “The primary reason was that it made sense. Amphoras didn’t appear in names so there would be no ambiguity about where the separation between login name and host name occurred. I used the ‘at sign’ to indicate that the user was at some other host rather than being local.”

The first email message was sent in late 1971 by Tomlinson between two host computers physically located side-by-side on the same floor. The network connection was through the APRANET.

Tomlinson said the first email message he sent likely contained the word “QUERTYIOP or something similar.”

Asked if he invented the @ sign, Tomlinson responded, “No, I did not invent the at sign! The at sign has been around for centuries. It’s possible I saved the at sign from extinction since some were considering removing the at sign from the keyboard and it would have followed the cent sign into exile.”

You can see a photograph of the two computers and teletype machines from which the first email message was sent and received through the ARPANET at https://bit.ly/3hZX3NE.

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson passed away March 5, 2016, at age 74.

My email address is bitscolumn@gmail.com.

Continue to stay safe out there.

Above image created by the writer of this column :-)

Predictions for the future

© Mark Ollig

We have just begun 2021, yet folks are trying to foretell what the next 100 years will reveal.

In case you are planning your calendar, Jan. 1, 2121, will occur on a Wednesday.

“We are already testing quantum key distribution from space to land instantaneously, near-light speed. The future [communications infrastructure] will not use cell towers or fiber optic cables,” predicts futurist book author Scott Amyx about the next 100 years.

He also feels the next 100 years will be the era of quantum computers.

“In a given day, we can weave in and out of multiple virtual worlds via immersive VR (virtual reality) and mixed reality with direct pathway to neurons using a combination of VR contacts and semi and invasive brain computer interface,” Amyx states.

Global futurist Rohit Talwar says human lifespans will reach 150 years, giving us “plenty of time to try our hand at everything we’d like to do.”

We have heard predictions about computer chips implanted in people for decades, and this will be the case 100 years from now, per Alexander Lopatine, a managing director with Fintech, who believes, “Everybody will have a computer chip installed immediately at birth.”

Humans living 100 years from now will have Artificial Intelligence (AI) sensor implants for advanced health monitoring, analytics, learning assistance, and more, predicts Chris Nielsen, founder of the technology company Levatast.

“Sensors as small as blood cells will travel the body’s bloodstream, identifying health risks and reporting them automatically for preventative care,” he said.

Today, this technology is being worked on and will undoubtedly become a regularly used diagnostic tool in humans within the next 100 years.

By 2121, we will have colonized other celestial bodies, as our technology will have established significantly improved and efficient space transport systems.

Within 100 years, many permanent human colonies will be living and working on the moon.

By 2121, humans will also have permanent bases operating on Mars.

Today, according to NASA, its Artemis program will send humans back to the moon by 2024.

NASA plans on a moon base for staging flights to Mars, with astronauts walking on the Martian surface by the mid-2030s.

SpaceX, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, is currently testing a spacecraft named Starship, which reportedly holds up to 100 people.

Musk says starships will colonize the moon, Mars, and other celestial destinations.

In 100 years, the Moon and Mars will become regularly-used staging bases for missions further into the solar system.

I anticipate within 100 years, we will send astronauts to explore the mysteries in the ocean waters under Europa’s ice sheets.

Before humans visit Europa, NASA has proposed a robotic spacecraft landing called the Europa Lander mission, with a tentative launch in 2027.

Information about Europa’s ocean is on NASA’s webpage at https://europa.nasa.gov/europa/ocean.

Of course, what would the year 2121 be without our robotic companions?

How about robotic replicas of ourselves?

Some futurists say in 100 years, a person will have several robot clones.

A human will instruct their robotic clones to complete specific tasks.

Of course, we need to heed past warnings about robots.

“Rossum’s Universal Robots,” was a play written by Czech writer, novelist, and journalist Karel Capek, and presented before the public in 1921.

Rossum’s Universal Robots is the factory’s name where artificial people or automatons, called “robots,” are being built.

The word robot or robotics, comes from the Czech word “robota,” meaning “forced labor” or “servitude.”

Toward the end of the play, the robot named Radius, who led the successful revolution against the humans, climbs atop a balcony railing and declares in measured tones to the other robots in the factory, “Robots of the world! The power of man has fallen! A new world has arisen: the Rule of the Robots! March!”

Scary.

Hopefully, robots in 2121 won’t attempt to take over the planet.

I have suggested in previous columns that future robots be equipped with an easily accessible off-switch.

“With advances in the efficiency of solar cells, it is likely that this free energy source will be used to create sub-aquatic human communities, breathing the oxygen they create and fueling their electrical needs through the act of hydrogen creation below the waves,” states an article in Future Living Report.

Not everyone with a view of the sea will be living below the waves.

Another prediction visualizes floating cities constructed atop the oceans all over the world.

By 2121, folks will be vacationing in Earth-orbiting hotels with a view that will be out of this world.

While it is fun looking ahead, I agree we need to get through 2021 with the hope of soon returning to a non-pandemic way of life.

In the meantime, continue to stay safe out there.

(Above clip art image right-to-use fee paid)