El radicalismo de Eusebio ha quedado también suficientemente acreditado

In the 1950s and 1960s, computer time was both scarce and expensive and writing games for the fun of it was actively discouraged at most computer centers. Nevertheless, there were many other reasons than just plain fun for writing computer games. Common reasons included exploring the power of the computer, improving understanding of human thought processes, producing educational tools for managers or military officers, simulating dangerous environments, and providing the means for discovery learning.

In some sense, the association of computers and games started in 1950 when Alan Turing, a British mathematician often considered the father of modern computer science, proposed his famous imitation game in the article ‘‘Computing Machinery and Intelli- gence,’’ published in Mind magazine. In the imitation game a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. Never programmed by Turing himself, a variation of Turing’s game called Eliza was put in the form of a computer program 13 years later by Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at MIT. In this game, the user could ‘‘converse’’ with the computer using real phrases and sentences. The computer would reply with a question to clarify the user’s statement gradually learning more and more about the user until it seemed that the computer was actually carrying on an intelligent, human-like conversation.

In 1952, behind a cloak of secrecy, the first military simulation games were programmed by Bob Chapman and others, researchers at Rand Air Defense Lab in Santa Monica. That same year, a number of ‘‘formula’’ games (Nim, etc.) and ‘‘dictionary look-up’’ games (Tic-tac-toe, etc.) were programmed for several early computers. Also in 1952, a computer was specially designed to play Hex, a game with no exact solution, by E.F. Moore and Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in New Jersey.

In 1953, Arthur Samuel, a researcher in artificial intelligence at IBM, first demonstrated his Checkers program on the newly unveiled IBM 701 computer at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York. Later that year, the book The Complete Strategyst by J. D. Williams was published by the RAND Corporation (Santa Monica, California). This was the first

primer on game theory and provided the theoretical foundation for many early computer game programs.

The first computer game of blackjack was programmed in 1954 for the IBM 701 at the Atomic Energy Laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Also in 1954, a crude game of pool—perhaps the first nonmilitary game to use a video display—was programmed at the University of Michigan.

The military set the pace for simulation games for many years, and in 1955, Hutspiel, the first theater-level war game (NATO vs. USSR) was programmed at the Research Analysis Corporation in McLean, Virginia.

Although Allen Newell, J. C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon, three computer science professors at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) are frequently credited with the first chess game—probably because they stayed at it for over 20 years—the first version of computer chess was actually programmed in 1956 by James Kister, Paul Stein, Stanisław Ulam, William Walden, and Mark Wells on the MANIAC-1 at the Los Alamos Atomic Energy Laboratory. The game was played on a simplified 6 x 6 board and examined all possible moves two levels deep at the rate of 12 moves per minute. It played at a similar level as a human player with about 20 games worth of experience. In contrast, Deep Thought, the 1990 computer chess champion, examined about 1.5 million moves per second and used a combination of brute force and intuitive play on a standard board. Although Deep Thought was rated at about 2600 on the FIDE system (tournament chess players are rated by the Federation Internationale des Eches, which orders players who participate in international games under strict tournament rules), which places it among the top 40 human players in the world, the program was decisively defeated by Garry Kasparov in a two-game match in October 1989. Except for a small band of enthusiasts, the interest in computer chess has waned somewhat, probably because the computer programs are so good that playing them is discouraging for all but a small handful of championship-level players.

In 1958, a tennis game, Tennis for Two, was designed for an analog computer at Brook- haven National Lab by Willy Higinbotham. This game, played on an oscilloscope display, was significant in that it was the first game to permit two players actually to control the direction and motion of the object moving on the screen (the ball). The object of the game was to maintain a volley for as long as possible by hitting the ball with one of the two rackets at each side of the screen. A line down the middle indicated the net; gravity, bounce, and even wind speed were calculated into game play.

In 1959, large-scale simulation games moved into the private sector with the program- ming of The Management Game by Kalman J. Cohen, Richard M. Cyert, and William R. Dill, and others at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. This game simulated competition between three companies in the detergent industry and integrated modules on marketing, production, finance, and research. Modified and updated for newer computers, but still in use at many graduate schools of business today, this game may well have set the record for the longest life of any computer game ever written. In this two-semester-long game, players make decisions about manufacturing, advertising, distribution, finances, personnel research and development, and all the aspects of running a real business over a simulated period of three years. Each week of play corresponds to a calendar quarter of business and the competition is fierce to have the highest profit and market share at the end of three years. (It is interesting to note that the Bendix G-15 computer with its rudimentary high-level GATE language, on and in which this game was initiated, is a direct descendent

of the very first electronic digital computer, Colossus, invented by Tommy Flowers in 1943 for codebreaking at Bletchley Park, United Kingdom.)

With the delivery in 1959 of the first Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-l computer with its 15-inch video display, the continuing evolution from text-only games to video games was dramatically hastened with the demonstration at an MIT open house in 1962 of Spacewar!, an interactive game written by Stephen R. Russell, J. Martin Graetz, and Alan Kotok. In this game, two crude spaceships orbited around a star that exerted a powerful gravitational pull on each ship. Each opponent controlled his ship and attempted to shoot the other ship while also trying to avoid being pulled into and burned up by the star.

Also in 1962, but in a completely different area, Omar K. Moore at Yale built a device called ‘‘The Talking Typewriter’’ for teaching reading to young children. In the device, built by Edison Electric, a computer controlled a CRT display, slide projector, and audio recorder. In 1964, a more general-purpose computer-assisted instruction (CAI) system using IBM hardware, including a CRT with graphics, light pen, and audio, was developed by Patrick Suppes at Stanford. Military research kept pace, and in 1964 the Bunker-Ramo Corporation demonstrated a CRT display that simultaneously combined computer data with a projected background.

Artists began to realize the potential of the computer in 1964 when A. Michael Noll at Bell Labs produced the first computer art on a CRT display. Many years later, spurred by such companies as Activision, Lucasfilm Games, and Cinemaware, artists began to play a much larger role in the creation of games through computer animation.

Rounding out the landmark year of 1964, the language Basic was developed by John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz on the GE 225 timesharing system at Dartmouth College. Within a few months, the first interactive educational games and simulations began to appear on the Dartmouth system.

Various types of graphics displays from many manufacturers were introduced in the mid-1960s, opening the door to new video effects. Thus, we find a video pool game developed at RCA (1967), a ball-and-paddle game by Ralph Baer at Sanders Associates (1967, later to become the Magnavox Odyssey home video game in 1972), a rocket car simulation by Judah Schwartz at MIT (1968), a graphic flight simulation by the computer firm Evans & Sutherland (1969), a lunar lander game at DEC (1969), and a device to permit computer output and standard television video on the same display at Stanford (1968).

In the October 1970 issue of Scientific American, Martin Gardner devoted his ‘‘Mathematical Games’’ column to a description of John Conway’s Game of Life. Easily programmed, it began to appear on virtually every video computer terminal in the country within weeks. In this game, colonies of figures reproduce, move around, and die off according to certain rules with the object of the game being to devise patterns that can sustain life for as long as possible.

In the late 1960s, the National Science Foundation was attempting to encourage the use of computers in secondary schools to improve science education. One of the notable NSF-funded projects that produced scores of simulation games in science and social studies was the Huntington Computer Project directed by Ludwig Braun at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (later at SUNY, Stony Brook). In the project’s Malaria simulation game, for example, students must try to control an outbreak of malaria in a Central

American country using a combination of various pesticides, inoculations, and treatment of the ill—all without bankrupting the country.

Also in the late 1960s, both DEC and Hewlett-Packard started major marketing efforts to sell computers to secondary and elementary schools. As a result, both companies sponsored a number of small-scale projects to write computer games and simulations in various fields, many of which were released in the early 1970s. In DEC’s King game (later called Hammurabi), for example, players must decide how much land to buy, sell, and cultivate each year, how much to feed the people, etc., while dealing with problems of industrial development, pollution, and tourism.

In 1972, William Crowther and Don Woods wrote a game for the DEC PDP-10 time- sharing system that they simply called Adventure. The game, the first in the interactive role-playing fantasy genre, was unbelievably popular and players consumed vast amounts of timeshared computer time on whatever system it was loaded.

By the mid-1970s, computer games had successfully made the transition to commercial arcade games and the rapidly expanding field of home computers, where their growing popularity helped them become the basis of an industry and a mass medium.

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