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Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

sublevelgames.github.io

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Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#11

Post by ljf »

glimshe wrote: post #5
michalpleban wrote: post #3

So basically it has a table of all possible moves, and after losing a game, it deletes a move that led to the defeat? Then why not simply have a smaller table of moves right from the start, with losing moves already removed?

Because that wouldn't help readers understand how the computer learns with this simple algorithm. People bought the book to not only play, but also learn from simple games. There's nothing quite like it nowadays.

I would have previously agreed (that there is nothing quite like it these days) - but my son is now part of an online games coding club. They start off assembling ready made 'Scratch' instructions, and playing at tweaking them. In later lessons they then start to write their own Scratch recipes, before moving to Python libraries then writing Python directly.

So far I've been really impressed with the materials, then tutors and the games they've made.

For what he has learnt, and the support they also provide outside of the lessons, £50 a month feels pretty cheap.

Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#12

Post by glimshe »

ljf wrote: post #11
glimshe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that wouldn't help readers understand how the computer learns with this simple algorithm. People bought the book to not only play, but also learn from simple games. There's nothing quite like it nowadays.

I would have previously agreed (that there is nothing quite like it these days) - but my son is now part of an online games coding club. They start off assembling ready made 'Scratch' instructions, and playing at tweaking them. In later lessons they then start to write their own Scratch recipes, before moving to Python libraries then writing Python directly. So far I've been really impressed with the materials, then…

Forgive me, but I don't think scratch is all that good - my son did it too. I never liked these super simplified approaches to computing because I don't think they are necessary. Scratch wouldnt be that useful in the 80s. BASIC, despite its flaws, was both simple and powerful. You could code in the same language as many pros from the get go.

Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#14

Post by JLemay »

The 1970s saw the birth of many foundational algorithms and concepts in machine learning, with research focusing on decision tree algorithms, clustering, and ensemble methods. I believe one of the first decision tree algorithms was created in 1973, crazy how early it all started!

Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#16

Post by diggernet »

> As an aside, line 511 is entered when it fails to find matching values with the current game state for all 19 boards and flipped boards. It seems like it was originally intended to be a comment using the REM command like 511 REM REMEMBER THE TERMINATION OF THIS LOOP IS IMPOSSIBLE, but perhaps that part was omitted during editing, so it just starts with REMEMBER.

Actually, that line does start with "511 REM". There was no requirement for REM to be followed by a space.

Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#17

Post by greentec »

diggernet wrote: post #16

> As an aside, line 511 is entered when it fails to find matching values with the current game state for all 19 boards and flipped boards. It seems like it was originally intended to be a comment using the REM command like 511 REM REMEMBER THE TERMINATION OF THIS LOOP IS IMPOSSIBLE, but perhaps that part was omitted during editing, so it just starts with REMEMBER. Actually, that line does start with "511 REM". There…

I didn't realize that! Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#18

Post by ljf »

glimshe wrote: post #12
ljf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have previously agreed (that there is nothing quite like it these days) - but my son is now part of an online games coding club. They start off assembling ready made 'Scratch' instructions, and playing at tweaking them. In later lessons they then start to write their own Scratch recipes, before moving to Python libraries then writing Python directly. So far I've been really impressed with the materials, then…

Forgive me, but I don't think scratch is all that good - my son did it too. I never liked these super simplified approaches to computing because I don't think they are necessary. Scratch wouldnt be that useful in the 80s. BASIC, despite its flaws, was both simple and powerful. You could code in the same language as many pros from the get go.

Yeah Scratch has a lot of limitations - but as an introduction to the concepts, it has been amazing. Watching him be able to build a game that he enjoyed on day one, then by maybe 6 lessons later to be using Python - has been great. I'm not a coder so it is not something I could help with (I play with Arduino etc. but I don't know python).

But getting the early simple lessons to explain how changing variables affects the game, and how to run things in sequence, has been really powerful for him.

Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#19

Post by lubujackson »

louthy wrote: post #13

Ah, the memories of inputting listings from magazines and books like these, only to find that I’d have one character wrong and the whole thing would fail (and I didn’t know enough to fix it). The vibe coding of its day! :D

I was a programmer a decade before my first Hello World!

Re: Solving a Childhood Mystery: How BASIC Games Learned to Win

#20

Post by glimshe »

ljf wrote: post #18
glimshe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, but I don't think scratch is all that good - my son did it too. I never liked these super simplified approaches to computing because I don't think they are necessary. Scratch wouldnt be that useful in the 80s. BASIC, despite its flaws, was both simple and powerful. You could code in the same language as many pros from the get go.

Yeah Scratch has a lot of limitations - but as an introduction to the concepts, it has been amazing. Watching him be able to build a game that he enjoyed on day one, then by maybe 6 lessons later to be using Python - has been great. I'm not a coder so it is not something I could help with (I play with Arduino etc. but I don't know python). But getting the early simple lessons to explain how changing variables affects…

You can learn a lot from Scratch, that's for sure. I'm not saying it's bad, it's actually a decent learning tool. But I think it's a step back from BASIC.

You could code a ton of fairly decent games, utilities and even full applications in BASIC. While that's theoretically possible in Scratch, it's a lot more cumbersome. Scratch feels more like a puzzle game than a real programming language. BASIC, especially the later, better dialects, could do it all. With 2 very understandable lines:

10 PRINT "glimshe rulez!"

20 GOTO 10

You could teach that the computer is under your command and you can ask it to do work for you nonstop. It teaches a bit of I/O, program sequence and loops. No stupid "main" functions, indentation nonsense, cryptic library includes or cumbersome drag-and-drop. The simplicity of the code above is one of the treasures of computing history. 90% or more of humanity can quickly understand these two lines and I super disagree with Dijkstra about BASIC.

It was at the same time a teaching tool and a professional programming language (although, arguably, not amazing at that).

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