Just to add some details, the Los Alamos Chess people acknowledged that theirs was not the first such computer program, that Alan Turing had previously done created one. Presumably Turing's program didn't ever beat a human, though.
I knew one of the authors, Mark Wells. After he retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory he moved, temporarily, to Las Cruces, NM, to be head of the CS department at New Mexico State University, so became my boss as a student employee in the department. I don't recall his authorship of the chess program being mentioned by any of the profs or grad students (it was a very small department). When I moved to Los Alamos many years later I discovered that he lived just down the street--they'd kept their house in Los Alamos while in Las Cruces and had returned (for the skiing, he said).
The first article linked below has some details about the chess program not in the Wikipedia article.
Chess was his (serious) hobby; his research was in programming language design, specifically concerning type theory.
I'd keep a house for the skiing at Pajarito too! For those reading along it's certainly worth the trip if you're in the area.
I have a vague recollection of coming across a physical 6x6 chessboard somewhere on lab property and found it a little odd, but never knew it had ties to MANIAC. Lots of history floating around in that place.
I and, coincidentally and separately a long-time friend, were homeless for a year while undergraduates. It was a financial necessity to stay in school full time (while working part-time) and not take out student loans. That was over 40 years ago. We both went on get Ph.D.s and become part of the middle class. As homeless students we were a rarity, but it wasn't unheard of--a former roommate student camped out of his car for half a year--just couldn't give up that car.
Last line, absolutely correct. Spew super-superficially-plausible nonsense to technical questions. Tell it it's wrong and it will either (or both) spew only superficially plausible nonsense and apologize that it was wrong.
Right now it's a great party trick and no more, IMO. And if one gets into more "sociological" questions it spews 1/3 factoids scraped from the web, 1/3 what could only be called moralizing, and 1/3 vomit-inducing PC/woke boilerplate. My only lack of understanding of its training is how the latter 2/3 were programmed in. I want only the first 1/3 supposedly-factual without the latter 2/3 insipid preaching. If a human responded like that they'd have no friends, groupies, adherents, or respect from anyone, including children.
I walk through drive-throughs regularly. I don't even get particularly odd looks like I'd initially expected. These include both fast food and bank/ATMs (or a teller at the other end).
Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a floating-point arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a year our product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a company name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software started.
When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees there.
As a founder/part-owner, like the other two he kicked in some money to get it started. Despite being a computer science professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold feet and his initial investment was bought out by the other two. (The other two ultimately went all-in and effectively gave up their professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)
1980, operating systems class, write a shell for UNIX. I thought I'd be clever and do more than simple pipes, so I created some syntax to enable the specification of a directed graph. It's pretty neat to see that someone has now done this industrial strength.
I think it's a pretty natural idea. According to Brian Kernighan's memoir, the original vision for pipes was more like a mesh than the omnidirectional flow we ended up with:
"Doug wanted to allow arbitrary connections in a sort of mesh of programs, but it was not obvious how to describe an unconstrained graph in a natural way, and there were semantic problems as well: data that flowed between programs would have to be queued properly, and queues could explode in an anarchic connection of programs. And Ken couldn't think of any real applications anyway."
My first thought when reading over the docs for dgsh is always something similar...what's the real application? What does it gain me other than some mathematical elegance that I don't lose in harder to read scripts? The examples all pretty much collapse to doing things in parallel and collecting them via cat, which seems a little basic for something as abstract as a DAG.
https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/at-the-bradbury/2023-...