Messing around on computers
Jun. 19th, 2019 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThis 2017 video from The 8-Bit Guy took me back:
The people in the video mention typing in the type-in programs in computer magazines as a formative experience for kids of our generation and a sneaky way we learned programming. I confess, I got Compute! magazine but I almost never had the patience to type those in. I think I only ever entered one or two of the big ones. (Often they were largely in machine language and involved typing in many dozens of lines of meaningless DATA statements, containing the machine instructions to be loaded into memory. I remember that eventually they came up with a standard loader program that took checksums along with the data, to make it easier to get everything in correctly.)
Hofstadter basically just wrote about anything that crossed his mind, from 19th-century nonsense literature to Cold War politics. This was consistent with his most famous work, Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, one of the weirdest hit popular-science books of all time: it was a rambling, phone-book-sized meditation on mathematical logic, artificial intelligence, psychology, computability theory, molecular genetics, particle physics, Baroque music and the art of Escher and Magritte, drawing sometimes illuminating and sometimes highly tenuous connections between all of them, with a structure alternating nonfiction chapters with goofy fantasy dialogues inspired by Lewis Carroll that explored the same topics metaphorically.
It was a huge influence on my developing brain, and so was Hofstadter's column. And that sometimes described experiments one could do with computers--experiments that I could attempt to replicate myself, in a small way.
After Hofstadter, A. K. Dewdney took over. Dewdney was a Canadian CS professor who'd previously been featured there for some of his own work, including his explorations into how a civilization might live in a two-dimensional universe (which he worked into a book called The Planiverse). Dewdney turned it into a straight-up messing-around-on-computers column called "Computer Recreations". So now it was stuff I could attempt to play around with basically every month.
In fact, I don't remember very well which ideas came from Hofstadter and which from Dewdney. But I wish I still had some of the stuff I wrote back then. Probably my two most ambitious creations directly inspired by those columns were a simple text bot that produced rambling nonsense sentences based on a messy recursive grammar of GOSUB statements, and an Atari BASIC turtle-graphics library that I could use to draw fractals and the like. And they undoubtedly had an influence on my school science-fair projects, which tended to lean heavily on computer programming: one of them was a little simulated ecology with critters whose behavior was controlled by genes that could mutate, and who were subject to natural selection.
(Dewdney later got into some weird 9/11 conspiracy-theory stuff, but there had been no hint of it at this point.)
The people in the video mention typing in the type-in programs in computer magazines as a formative experience for kids of our generation and a sneaky way we learned programming. I confess, I got Compute! magazine but I almost never had the patience to type those in. I think I only ever entered one or two of the big ones. (Often they were largely in machine language and involved typing in many dozens of lines of meaningless DATA statements, containing the machine instructions to be loaded into memory. I remember that eventually they came up with a standard loader program that took checksums along with the data, to make it easier to get everything in correctly.)
I was more interested in writing my own programs for my Atari 8-bit machine, but I wasn't sufficiently willing to delve into the technical details of the platform to become a 6502 machine-language virtuoso. Instead... I found myself waiting excitedly for Scientific American magazine.
See, in the back of Scientific American in those days was a column that originally belonged to Martin Gardner, the mathematics popularizer and skeptic-movement founder, and was called "Mathematical Games". Gardner's column was great but he only infrequently did anything directly computer-related; but he retired in the early 1980s (I think his last column was a searing denunciation of Arthur Laffer's economics) and handed it over to AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter, who renamed it with the anagram "Metamagical Themas".
Hofstadter basically just wrote about anything that crossed his mind, from 19th-century nonsense literature to Cold War politics. This was consistent with his most famous work, Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, one of the weirdest hit popular-science books of all time: it was a rambling, phone-book-sized meditation on mathematical logic, artificial intelligence, psychology, computability theory, molecular genetics, particle physics, Baroque music and the art of Escher and Magritte, drawing sometimes illuminating and sometimes highly tenuous connections between all of them, with a structure alternating nonfiction chapters with goofy fantasy dialogues inspired by Lewis Carroll that explored the same topics metaphorically.
It was a huge influence on my developing brain, and so was Hofstadter's column. And that sometimes described experiments one could do with computers--experiments that I could attempt to replicate myself, in a small way.
After Hofstadter, A. K. Dewdney took over. Dewdney was a Canadian CS professor who'd previously been featured there for some of his own work, including his explorations into how a civilization might live in a two-dimensional universe (which he worked into a book called The Planiverse). Dewdney turned it into a straight-up messing-around-on-computers column called "Computer Recreations". So now it was stuff I could attempt to play around with basically every month.
In fact, I don't remember very well which ideas came from Hofstadter and which from Dewdney. But I wish I still had some of the stuff I wrote back then. Probably my two most ambitious creations directly inspired by those columns were a simple text bot that produced rambling nonsense sentences based on a messy recursive grammar of GOSUB statements, and an Atari BASIC turtle-graphics library that I could use to draw fractals and the like. And they undoubtedly had an influence on my school science-fair projects, which tended to lean heavily on computer programming: one of them was a little simulated ecology with critters whose behavior was controlled by genes that could mutate, and who were subject to natural selection.
(Dewdney later got into some weird 9/11 conspiracy-theory stuff, but there had been no hint of it at this point.)