Quote:
Originally Posted by freecartoonporn
looks like i was reading wrong articles.
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The most interesting thing is that 80-byte program (its code was about two times shorter than a twitter message) was self educating. It was giving better and better predictions after each run. The simplest way to trick it was... guess which one? To use a real coin. Just stop generating the "random" numbers in your head and trust to real coin - the program will be defeated.
By the way, do you know what a nerdy Soviet kid like me has wanted to have when he was 12-13 year old? No, not a real semi-automatic gun, because I had it already. And not a woman, because I was unable to afford one (but I had a very good imagination ;)).
I wanted a programming calculator - a very expensive piece of Soviet shit which was able to run a 105-byte program and has a memory on 15 numbers.... including (wow!) the real ones with (wow again!) a floating point!
The first program I wrote was a 20-25 byte ballistic emulator of a tank fight. The player (a cannon operator) had a few attempts to hit a moving tank by changing the barrel angle till it (the enemy tank) enters its fire range (the range of its own cannon) and destroy you. The second game was a Moon landing simulator about 40-45 bytes length.
The 3rd program was a serial maniac emulator (LOL!) The program knew your exact location in X-Y coordinates, the location of a maniac and the location of a safe place where you had to arrive. Since it was a night you didn't know shit. The program just told you the distance (not coordinates) of the safe place and the maniac. So you were need to do a blind escape. Just choose the angle (from 0 to 359 degrees) and step in that direction. The maniac was moving about two times slower than you, but... he knew your actual location (a night vision device?) and he has never lost the track. Sounds like a very stupid game scenario based on Pythagorean theorem, but it gave me some feeling of a horror movie during cold winter nights in 80s ;)
And you can believe me or not, but all those programs were using real physical formulas to calculate things like a ballistic trajectory (well, excepting a windage). The Moon landing game was absolutely realistic, because it used the exactly same formulas that were used for the
World's first soft Moon landing which was done by the Soviet spaceship "Luna-9" in 1966.