Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

striking game.There had been several attempts to do this kind of thing on the TX-0. One of themwas a hack called Mouse in the Maze the user first constructed a maze with thelight pen, and a blip on the screen representing a mouse would tentatively poke itsway through the maze in search of another set of blips in the shape of cheesewedges. There was also a "VIP version" of the game, in which the mouse wouldseek martini glasses. After it got to the glass, it would seek another, until it ran outof energy, too drunk to continue. When you flicked the switches to run the mousethrough the maze a second time, though, the mouse would "remember" the path tothe glasses, and like an experienced barfly would unhesitatingly scurry toward thebooze. That was as far as display hacks would go on the TX-0.But already on the PDP-1, which had a screen that was easier to program than theTX-0's, there had been some significant display hacks. The most admired effortwas created by one of the twin gurus of artificial intelligence at MIT, MarvinMinsky. (The other one was, of course, McCarthy.) Minsky was more outgoingthan his fellow AI guru, and more willing to get into the hacker mode of activity.He was a man with very big ideas about the future of computing he really believedthat one day machines would be able to think, and he would often create a big stirby publicly calling human brains "meat machines," implying that machines notmade of meat would do as well some day. An elfish man with twinkling eyesbehind thick glasses, a starkly bald head, and an omnipresent turtleneck sweater,Minsky would say this with his usual dry style, geared simultaneously tomaximize provocation and to leave just a hint that it was all some cosmic goof ofcourse machines can't think, heh-heh. Marvin was the real thing; the PDP-1hackers would often sit in on his course, Intro to AI 6.544, because not only wasMinsky a good theoretician, but he knew his stuff. By the early 1960s, Minsky wasbeginning to organize what would come to be the world's first laboratory inartificial intelligence; and he knew that, to do what he wanted, he would needprogramming geniuses as his foot soldiers so he encouraged hackerism in any wayhe could.One of Minsky's contributions to the growing canon of interesting hacks was adisplay program on the PDP-1 called the Circle Algorithm. It was discovered bymistake, actually while trying to bum an instruction out of a short program tomake straight lines into curves or spirals, Minsky inadvertently mistook a "Y"character for a "Y prime," and instead of the display squiggling into inchoatespirals as expected, it drew a circle: an incredible discovery, which was later foundto have profound mathematical implications. Hacking further, Minsky used theCircle Algorithm as a stepping-off point for a more elaborate display in whichthree particles influenced each other and made fascinating, swirling patterns on thescreen, self-generating roses with varying numbers of leaves. "The forces particles