I wonder what Mr. Ahl has been up to. Last thing I heard was Small Basic with Microsoft.
BASIC Computer Games
51–60 of 124 posts
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#52Nice blast from the past.
I taught myself to code by typing these in by hand on my TRS-80. And trying to debug when something wouldn’t work.
Back in the day when something didn’t work and you had nowhere to turn, you had to bang your head against the code until you figured it out.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#53Dawww. I had this book when it came out and used to type the programs into my Commodore PET by hand! Boy does this bring back memories.
I really think there's something magical about beginners typing in whole projects by hand (instead of the modern copy-paste). It really helped me when I was getting started with programming. To me, it feels like typing each character manually cements the knowledge in there much deeper than 'oh, I think I understand what I'm copy/pasting.' Maybe that's a shallow truism by now, but I still see people struggling to lear…
That's a smart take. Even today when I'm learning something new I try to do as much physical typing as possible from the example because I feel like I learn it better.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#54I remember young me spending hours on a VIC-20 version of animal.bas ("Computer guesses animals and learns new ones from you"). Given enough time and training input the computer could answer any question put to it! It helped open my eyes to the magic of computation and still gives me a bit of a tingle when I think about it.
Congratulations, that makes you a ML expert! Put that on your resume and rake in that sweet west-coast VC cash! :)
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#55Dawww. I had this book when it came out and used to type the programs into my Commodore PET by hand! Boy does this bring back memories.
I had it too, but typed them into my Atari 800 - after which I'd save it to cassette tape.
Nice! My Commodore PET had a tape cassette drive. It was SOO unreliable.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#56Had great times with this one and the "More Basic Computer Games" book.
My favorites were the Eliza clone, and ICBM, where you are trying to intercept an incoming ICBM with a anti-ballistic missle. My first use of trig functions, which really helped solidify the concepts to me. I also converted the 2-D version to 3-D (with altitude) for even more fun.
I was originally using a TRS-80 Color Computer, with a slightly different dialect of BASIC, so I was usually having to make modifications. Which also helped me learn programming.
Great, great times.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#57Had great times with this one and the "More Basic Computer Games" book. My favorites were the Eliza clone, and ICBM, where you are trying to intercept an incoming ICBM with a anti-ballistic missle. My first use of trig functions, which really helped solidify the concepts to me. I also converted the 2-D version to 3-D (with altitude) for even more fun. I was originally using a TRS-80 Color Computer, with a slightly di…
Raise your hands everyone who typed in Eliza clones in the mid-80s and thought you would solve general AI using BASIC in the not-too-distant future.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#58i had expected that there's a javascript emulator to try the games without having to download one and setup yourself.
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#59Had great times with this one and the "More Basic Computer Games" book. My favorites were the Eliza clone, and ICBM, where you are trying to intercept an incoming ICBM with a anti-ballistic missle. My first use of trig functions, which really helped solidify the concepts to me. I also converted the 2-D version to 3-D (with altitude) for even more fun. I was originally using a TRS-80 Color Computer, with a slightly di…
> I was originally using a TRS-80 Color Computer, with a slightly different dialect of BASIC, so I was usually having to make modifications. Which also helped me learn programming.
Same here! Those two books, along with a ton of magazines and more than a few other books, plus one I found that had "conversions" - helped me greatly to learn programming as a kid.
I eventually found a great book on Fortran graphics - which I also started converting (Fortran and BASIC are very similar).
There's a third book in the "Basic Computer Games" series - I don't recall exactly it's name, but you can probably find it on archive.org. It had a blue cover, and I believed it dealt with much larger, adventure-style games.
Not to mention, there were special editions created for Radio Shack and the TRS-80 as well...
Re: BASIC Computer Games
#60Had great times with this one and the "More Basic Computer Games" book. My favorites were the Eliza clone, and ICBM, where you are trying to intercept an incoming ICBM with a anti-ballistic missle. My first use of trig functions, which really helped solidify the concepts to me. I also converted the 2-D version to 3-D (with altitude) for even more fun. I was originally using a TRS-80 Color Computer, with a slightly di…
Raise your hands everyone who typed in Eliza clones in the mid-80s and thought you would solve general AI using BASIC in the not-too-distant future.
Between those, tic-tac-toe learning systems, the various 20-questions things...
Later I played with various "expert system" stuff, then there was David L. Heiserman's "Machine Intelligence" and "Robot Intelligence" books...
I tried to understand early neural network stuff, but I could not get my then teenage head around it; in fact, none of it became clear until I took Andrew Ng's "ML Class" in 2011 as an adult (part of the key was understanding the role of linear algebra and matrix math in the system - among other things - that class was the first that explained it very clearly, and the use of octave was also a revelation).
Since that class, I've continued to play with ML/AI, mainly via a couple of courses thru Udacity (including their "self-driving car engineer nanodegree").
So - one could say I still have hope? Ha!