Sometimes the player performs operations to physically compute for the game: rolling a dice for a random number. Which is a long way of saying: if you can say something with maths, you can construct an algorithm that computes it.īoard games are doing this all the time and we just don’t think about it so much: One of my favourite YouTubes of all time is the 1950s US Navy educational film explaining how mechanical computers perform maths:Īnd if you know a little about analogue electronics, you know that basic electrical circuits just do maths, and from there you can create all the complex logic of analogue and digital computing. You can encode these operations in a (real) computer program by writing code. That’s what a slide rule does: “multiplication” is just adding the value several times.) …and from there all mathematics is possible… (seriously. And when you start to think of programming in these terms, all sorts of interesting “computer programs” are there to be explored:Ĭomputer programs are just algorithms-often big and quite complex-but at their heart, just a list of mathematical instructions: And many mechanical fire control computers from the beginning-of-the-end of the era in which “computer” was a role filled by women.Īll of these devices share a common limitation: they may be programable to a degree, but they solve a singular problem: the Writer can only hand-write a message stored in his main cam “memory”, the Difference Engine and Curta perform particular mathematical operations, fire control computers perform only that calculation…the device is the program, in the same way that Wolfenstein 3D is a first-person shooter, not the computer or operating system or programming language used to make it run.The Difference Engine (more about Ada Lovelace’s adventures in computing in this delightful graphic novel).Jaquet Droz’s The Writer: a 1770 programmable automaton that could hand-write tweets.There are of course, all sorts of early “computers” of various flavours that predate what we generally mean when we talk about computer programs: Wait what? A physical game can be a computer? Last week I stumbled on a magic trick of a Choose Your Own Adventure: Al Leonardi’s Ace of Aces, a paper computer running a first-person shooter, programmed in 1980-eleven years before Wolfenstein 3D, the “first” first-person shooter. Every now and again you come across something that stretches your brain in a new direction.
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