Just an 18-bit Western Sheriff (20090217)
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The MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-0 computer was built in 1956, and was made available to the Research Laboratory of Electronics and Electronic Systems Laboratory in 1958. It was delivered with 4K of memory, later expanded to 8K.
On October 26, 1960, the CBS Television Network broadcast a one hour special called "The Thinking Machine". This broadcast included the first television production from scripts written by computer.
Doug Ross writes, The CBS director said, "Gee, Westerns are so cut and dried couldn't you write a program for one?"
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The program SAGA-II, written by Doug Ross and Harrison Morse, output a short script which described the actions in a scenario: a sheriff surprises a robber hiding out in his shack. The 13,000 line macro-generated program took 6 weeks to develop, and each run of the program took approximately 2 minutes to generate a new script.
beginnt1+23| X
gun is in right hand
money is in left hand
nt1+23| tra bwr tra bwh
begin t0
gun is in right hand
money is in left hand
drink is on table
robber is in corner
right hand is on robber
left hand is on robber
holster is on robber
bottle is on table
right hand has gun
left hand has money
holster has nothing
t00
gun is in corner
t01
...
The program combined a logic flowchart with several random decision points (e.g., how much has the robber had to drink) which affected the outcome (an "inebriation factor" led to the robber being a poorer shot). Out of the 50 runs, 3 were televised.
Doug Ross: The memory was used to keep track of everything down to the actors' hands. The logic choreographed the movement of each object, hands, guns, glasses, doors, etc. A line of English script was written for each direction, even if it went wrong. That's how we got the loop sequence which was an actual error run. If you watch closely, the sheriff puts his gun in the robber's holster, and other strange things.
Dit Morse: I've been asked if the error sequence was rigged. Well, it turns out that the CBS people were in the TX-0 room when the machine got into that loop. They saw what the programmer was doing and they grabbed that sucker so fast-they knew it was theater.
John Pfeiffer later wrote, in the follow-on book to the show, that
The ending of one script was definitely offbeat. The rule is that the winner goes to the corner, picks up the money, leaves the shack, and takes one last look through the window. This time, however, a mix-up occurred. The sheriff thought he had won and went through the scheduled actions. But the robber was not dead. He was supposed to follow the winner's routine, which meant, first of all, getting the money. Since the money was not in the corner, he reached through the window and took it from the sheriff's hand. Then he left the shack and joined the sheriff at the window. The script ended with both men alive and on the outside lokoing into an empty room.
This is the closest the machine came to writing an "original" script. Apparently nothing was wrong with the circuits or the program at the time, and it is still a mystery why the sheriff thought he had won.
Copyright 1999-2011 Mark Wahl. All rights reserved.