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Microsoft makes Zork open-source

opensource.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#241

Post by WorldMaker »

drob518 wrote: post #236
WorldMaker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MDL is what was in wide use at MIT at the time, the PDP-10 era. The M in MDL is sometimes "MIT" in the various backronyms of what it stood for. (Mostly it was apparently just short for "muddle", a self-deprecating description.) (Also, to be technically correct, these source files aren't even MDL, they are a further descendant called ZIL [Zork Implementation Language].)

Yea, I get that MDL came from MIT, but I have to think that MACLISP was far more used at MIT at that time. But maybe not.

It sounds like from what I've read MACLISP and MDL were side-by-side for a while at MIT and something of a department choice. MACLISP sounds like the serious effort and I read MDL as the "hip" or maybe rebellious upstart with a weirder sense of humor (it was called Muddle and spelled MDL to make it seem like an appropriately serious acronym), which would also make some sense that Zork originated in that allowed to be sillier language.

(Also, in reading other comments around here, I've learned there's a deeper connection in MDL to Scheme than I knew before, so I hadn't realized the Lisp/Scheme split even has ties to this "competition" of Lisp languages at MIT.)

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#243

Post by MPSimmons »

clockworksoul wrote: post #126
MPSimmons wrote: post #86

I like playing Zork via docker: https://github.com/clockworksoul/docker-zork1 > docker run -it clockworksoul/zork1

Somebody uses it! Yay! You made my day

Thanks for making this! Yeah, I play it whenever I have some time. Lots of fun!

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#244

Post by jasomill »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #234
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about the fourth article I've read that mentions Lisp today on here. Okay, I get it. Lisp is great. Where should I start? It wasn't like I was planning on doing anything else at work next week...

The first step is to overcome the syntax. It's useful to think in terms of Python syntax at first. f(x) (f x) ["f", "x"] (print ( Lisp code is just list data which gets evaluated by an interpreter function. Like this: code = ["print", [" Filling out that eval function is a great way to learn. I only truly understood lisp when I implemented my own. These articles are very good and accessible: https://www.norvig.com/li…

Funny you mention this, as I've written quite a bit of Python code that works just like this, typically in the form of an evaluator for some random proprietary language I've parsed into an AST in the form of a Python list or tuple.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#245

Post by Night_Thastus »

nebula8804 wrote: post #224
Night_Thastus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we ever get to the point of having a tool that could do something that complex, we're well past the point of using human-written operating systems or using M-series processors. Which is to say, very, very, very far away.

Hmm I seem to recall Karpathy talk about the next era of software being like this: Essentially everything is made on demand exactly the way the user expects or something like that. it would definitely be a paradigm shift that requires rethinking how we approach software. What do we really need? If you look at what Ai can solve today, smaller problems seem to be solved really well by AI. So just an AI with a large eno…

What we call "AI" right now could never do something of the complexity we're discussing. It has no memory, no experiences, no consciousness, no capability to continually learn, no ability to abstractly understand ideas and apply them.

It's text probabilities in a box. Until something comes around that is NOT an LLM, it doesn't matter how much memory or training data you throw at it, the fundamental idea can't work.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#246

Post by randall »

Gormo wrote: post #94
randall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whoa til microsoft owns blizzard.

And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves. IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.

yeah i think this is totally reasonable.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#247

Post by drob518 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #174
drob518 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very Lispy, but it’s not strictly Lisp. Why, for instance, use “ ” to surround various forms but not others? If they were to make a mini-Lisp, I’d expect something more like Gnu Emacs Lisp, something that’s obviously a Lisp, but heavily influenced by the Lisps of the day. I’ve found a few old MDL manuals linked from Wikipedia, but none of them have any sort of “Here’s why we created MDL” section that I could fin…

MDL is Grue Emacs Lisp ;)

Heh!

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#248

Post by VikingCoder »

clockworksoul wrote: post #126
MPSimmons wrote: post #86

I like playing Zork via docker: https://github.com/clockworksoul/docker-zork1 > docker run -it clockworksoul/zork1

Somebody uses it! Yay! You made my day

Thanks for your work on this!

I tried to use these official sources to make my own.

https://github.com/MattCruikshank/zork1-source

Curious if you have feedback:

> docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd)/saves:/home/zork/save mattcruikshank/zork1-source:latest

The -v lets me save and restore.

I tried to use Docker Compose to specify the volume... But the TTY support there feels terrible, and I don't know how to fix it.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#249

Post by VikingCoder »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #231
VikingCoder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zilf liked it, but Zapf is flagged by Windows 11 Smart App Control as potentially dangerous to my machine... And there's no way to turn it off for one app. And if I turn it off, I can only turn it back on by re-installing Windows. What the bloody... So now I want to download and build. But it's .net 10, so I apparently need VS 2026, which I hadn't bothered to install yet. Oh my.

You just need dotnet core. You can compile from a command line on any os. You can install dotnet on linux.

You can try it now, if you like:

> docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd)/saves:/home/zork/save mattcruikshank/zork1-source:latest

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#250

Post by OrangeMusic »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #208
monkeywork wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get that the announcement was written by an LLM - they list the authors of the article on the page.

> When Zork arrived, it didn’t just ask players to win; it asked them to imagine. There were no graphics, no joystick, and no soundtrack, only words on a screen and the player’s curiosity. Yet those words built worlds more vivid than most games of their time. What made that possible wasn’t just clever writing, it was clever engineering. Check out wikipedia's "signs of ai generated writing". Every sentence here is rep…

I speak like that, and I'm not an LLM (to my knowledge!).
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