Games / Sports / Simulations Timeline

Date of the first Olympic games, according to ancient Greek records, which also represent the adoption in Greece of the Phoenician alphabet, from which all other Western alphabets are descended.

The date is based on inscriptions, found at Olympia, of the winners of a foot race held every four years, starting in 776 BCE.

"There is little doubt that both playing cards and dominoes originated in China and that both games were influenced by certain forms of divination and the drawing of lots and possibly by paper money. There are certain indications that the development of playing cards took place at about the same time as the transition from manuscript rolls to paged books. As the advent of printing made it more convenient to produce and use books in the form of pages, so was it easier to produce cards. These 'sheet-dice,' as they were called, began to appear according to Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-72) before the end of the Tang dynasty, and if this is true, they were one of the earliest forms of block printing in China, as they were in the West" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 184).

"The earliest references to playing cards in Europe that can be clearly differentiated from chess, follow each other with rapid succession in various countries—Germany 1377, Spain 1377, Luxemburg 1379, Italy 1379, Belgium 1379, France 1382. . . "(Carter, Invention of Printing in China, 2nd ed. [1955] 185).

At this time playing cards in Europe were probably not printed.

Card makers, who presumably were card printers printing from wood-blocks, are mentioned five times in the city records of Augsburg and Nuremberg by 1418. About the same time the records of the city of Ulm in Germany show that cards were being shipped in barrels to Sicily and Italy.

Carter, History of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955) 186.

The first artist known to produce copperplate engravings, and the "first personality" in the history of printmaking, the "Master of the Playing Cards," was active in Germany from roughly 1435 to 1455. Of this artist about 100 engravings are known. He is associated with playing cards because sixty of his engravings are playing cards— the first cards printed from intaglio plates.

An edict of the Council of Venice indicated that the card printing industry in this city was being interfered with by outside competition.

An unidentified printer, known as the "Schoolmaster Printer," issued the Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry (also known as The Boke of St. Albans) from the town of St. Albans, England.

This work on hawking, hunting, heraldry, and etiquette was the earliest book printed in England to include color printing. It is also the first English book on heraldry and sports, and among the earliest, if not the earliest printed book written by a woman, whose name is variously given as Juliana Berners, though this attribution has been disputed. Little is known about the presumed authoress; some of the most basic information about her is given in the second edition of this work issued by Wynkyn de Worde from his press at Westminister in 1496. She is said to have been prioress of Sopwell nunnery near St Albans, and daughter of Sir James Berners, who was beheaded in 1388.

This work "was, in effect an etiquette manual, one of a number of books published at that time-- a period of social and linguistic flux following the Hundred Years War (1337-1463)-- that showed gentlemen the proper way to act. Thus, the preponderance of terms for birds and animals results from the fact that The Book of St. Albans was concerned largely with hunting, shooting, and the like. It provided instruction on how to comport oneself in the hunt, but also on how to kill, clean and cook fish and game, and in what seasons and times of the day to sally forth. The book concludes with a list of correct terms, so that one could safely say one was hunting a singular of boars--not, heaven forfend, a group of them. As such, it takes the typical function of jargon-defining and reinforcing an exclusive group--to poetical extremes that have lingered in the language since.

"Less remembered terms from the Boke reflect the social life of the age. Berners gives us the appropriate ways to speak about a group of maidens (a rage), housekeepers (a foresight), officers (an execution), and even jugglers (a neverthriving--the poor men!). The tension between relgiious and social freedom prevalent in that era is also palpable: the group term for nuns is a superfluity, and for monks it is an abominable sight. (Tellingly, for the Scottish Reformation to come, that country contains a disworship of Scots). There is no standard linguistic analysis of the different types of collective terms, but Lipton inventories them using six different categories: onomatopeia, characteristic, appearance, habitat, commentary, and error. Appearance brings us a knot of toads, for example, while characteristic gives us a building of rooks, for how rooks build their nests. By far the most illuminating are those that develop via characteristic to comment on social behavior, such as the foresight of housekeepers mentioned above; an abeisance of servants; an impatence of wives;and more cheeringly, a cajolery of taverners. In the category of errors, on the other hand, stands the rage of maidens--not related to any anger on the part of virgins, but rather coming from an Old French ragier, or wantonness (making for an unintentionally ironic commentary on maidenhood in 1486" (Gronlund,"Inventory /A Pendantry of Nouns," Cabinet-A Quarterly of Art and Culture, Issue 41, [Spring 2011] 10).  

Lipton, An Exhaltation of Larks or, The Venereal Game (1977).

ISTC no. ib01030000.

In 1738 Jacques Vaucanson completed his Canard digérateur or Digesting Duck, an automaton that imitated or simulated the process of eating kernels of grain, of digestion, and of defecation.

"The duck had over 400 moving parts in each wing alone, and could flap its wings, drink water, digest grain, and defecate. Although Vaucanson's duck supposedly demonstrated digestion accurately, his duck actually contained a hidden compartment of 'digested food', so that what the duck defecated was not the same as what it ate; the duck would eat a mixture of water and seed and excrete a mixture of bread crumbs and green dye that appeared to the onlooker indistinguishable from real excrement. Although such 'frauds' were sometimes controversial, they were common enough because such scientific demonstrations needed to entertain the wealthy and powerful to attract their patronage. Vaucanson is credited as having invented the world's first flexible rubber tube while in the process of building the duck's intestines. Despite the revolutionary nature of his automata, he is said to have tired quickly of his creations and sold them in 1743" (Wikipedia article on Jacques Vaucanson, accessed 05-20-2013).

Vaucanson's Canard digérateur was the first automaton to simulate biological processes.

In 1742 Vaucanson's flute-player and his duck were exhibited at the Opera House in the Hay-Market in London. In association with that exhbition  Vaucanson's booklet describing the automata was translated into English by J. T. Desaguliers and published as An Account of the Machanism of an Automaton, or Images Playing on the German Flute. 

In 1744 printer and publisher John Newbery of London announced the availability of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer by M. F. Thwaite and John Newbery. The first edition appears to be known only from an advertisement in the Penny London Morning Advertiser published on June 18, 1744. If copies were issued at that time they appear to have been read out of existence.

This small book, of which very few copies of early editions survived, is generally considered the first book for children in the modern sense. It consists of simple rhymes for each of the letters of the alphabet. To market the book to the children of the day the book could be purchased alone for 6d., or with a ball (for boys) or a pincushion (for girls) at a cost of 8d. 

The book includes a woodcut of stoolball and a rhyme entitled "Base-Ball." This is the first known instance of the word baseball in print. In the book "Base-Ball" refers to the game Rounders, which had been played in England since Tudor times.

The book was very popular in England, and was first published in Colonial America in 1762. 

♦ A facsimile of the edition printed in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1787 by Isaiah Thomas is available the Library of Congress website. In 1966 Oxford University Press issued a facsimile of the earliest known complete copy of an edition— that of London, 1767, preserved in the British Library. The facsimile included an introductory essay and biibliography by M. F. Thwaite, and an index to the introduction and bibliography. Thwaite wrote in his introduction, p. 3:

"The world of the day probably had little idea that this small work was in any way notable, or that it marked a new era in literature for the young. But there was one word in the advertisement which might have struck them an unusual. It was a word which was to open up new realms to young minds. To avow 'amusement' as a principal end in a book for boys and girls indicated that a revolution had taken place. In the past children's books had been reluctant to admit this feature, but in this new century of reason it was to be demonstrated that pleasure should be an important element, even though still firmly leashed to the old purposes of morality and instuction. Newbery was therefore only expressing the new spirit abroad. Before 1700 books for the young had been dominated by religious teaching, moral lessons or scholastic purpose. Now amusement was to be an equally desirable aim. And no one in those formative years of children's book-making was to follow it so well or to carry it so far as John Newbery."

Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen de Pázmánd (Hungarian: Kempelen Farkas) built his chess-playing Turk, an automaton that purported to play chess.  Although the machine displayed an elaborate gear mechanism, its cabinet actually concealed a small human controlling the moves of the machine.

Von Kempelen's Turk became a commercial sensation, deceiving a very large number of people. It became the most famous, or the most notorious, automaton in history. It also must have been kind of an open secret within the professional chess community because over the years numerous chess masters were hired so that The Turk could challenge all comers with its chess skills:

"With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Although many had suspected the hidden human operator, the hoax was revealed only in the 1820s by the Londoner Robert Willis. The operator(s) within the mechanism during Kempelen's original tour remains a mystery. When the device was later purchased in 1804 and exhibited by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, the chess masters who secretly operated it included Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret, and William Schlumberger" (Wikipedia article on The Turk, in my opinion one of the best articles in the English Wikipedia, accessed 01-20-2012).

According to to a magazine article by Edgar Allan Poe, the original Turk was exhibited in Richmond, Virginia as late as 1836.

Even though the machine intelligence exhibited by the Turk was an illusion, von Kempelen's automaton was much later viewed as an analog to efforts in computer chess and artificial intelligence.

Austro-Hungarian author and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, published in Vienna Mechanismus der mensclichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine, in which he discussed the origins and development of languages, and described the first successful speech synthesizer.

Unlike von Kempelen’s fraudulent chess-playing Turk automaton , Kempelin's speech synthesizer actually worked.  Kempelen's synthesizer was the first that produced not only some speech sounds, but also whole words and short sentences. He believed that it was possible to acquire skill in using the machine within three weeks, especially if one chose to synthesize sentences in Latin, French, or Italian. German von Kempelen considered much more difficult to synthesize because of its many closed syllables and consonant clusters.

"The machine consisted of a bellows that simulated the lungs and was to be operated with the right forearm (uppermost drawing). A counterweight provided for inhalation. The middle and lower drawings show the 'wind box' that was provided with some levers to be actuated with the fingers of the right hand, the 'mouth', made of rubber, and the 'nose' of the machine. The two nostrils had to be covered with two fingers unless a nasal was to be produced. The whole speech production mechanism was enclosed in a box with holes for the hands and additional holes in its cover.

"The air flow was conducted into the mouth not only by way of an oscillating reed, but also through a narrow shunting tube. This allowed the air pressure in the mouth cavity to increase when its opening was covered tightly in order to produce unvoiced speech sounds. Driven by a spring, a small auxiliary bellows would then deliver an extra puff of air at the release.

"With the left hand, it was also possible to control the resonance properties of the mouth by varied covering of its opening. In this way, some vowels and consonants could be simulated in sufficient approximation. This was not really a simulation of natural articulation, since the shape of the mouth of the machine in itself remained constant. Some vowels and, especially, the consonants [d t g k] could not be simulated in this way, but only feigned, at best. An [l] could be produced by putting the thumb into the mouth.

"The function of the vocal cords was simulated by a slamming reed made of ivory (leftmost drawing). Although the effective length of the reed could be varied, this could not be done during speech production, so that the machine spoke on a monotone.

"Two of the levers to be actuated with the right hand served the production of the fricatives [s] and . . . as well as [z] and . . . by means of separate, hissing whistles (right drawing). A third one effectuated the production of a rattling [R] by dropping a wire on the vibrating reed (middle drawing)." (http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/kemplne.htm, accessed 12-14-2008).

Kempelin's final version of the machine, which differs slightly from the version shown in the book, is preserved in the Deutsches Museum, Munich, in the department of musical instruments.

Because Kempelin's speech synthesizer required a human for its operation it was not literally an automation but may be thought of as a forerunner of robotic or computer speech synthesizers.

German inventor Karl Drais invented the Laufmaschine ("running machine"), later called the velocipede, draisine (English) or "draisienne" (French), or nick-named, dandy horse. This incorporated the two-wheeler principle that is basic to the bicycle and motorcycle and represented the beginning of mechanized personal transportation.  Drais took his first recorded ride on the Laufmachine from Mannheim to Rheinau, now a suburb of Mannheim on June 12, 1817.

"The dandy-horse was a two-wheeled vehicle, with both wheels in-line, propelled by the rider pushing along the ground with the feet as in regular walking or running. The front wheel and handlebar assembly was pivoted to allow steering.

"Several manufacturers in France and England made their own dandy-horses during its brief popularity in the summer of 1819 -- most notably, Denis Johnson of London, who used an elegantly curved wooden frame which allowed the use of larger wheels. Riders preferred to operate their vehicles on the smooth pavements instead of the rough roads, but their interactions with pedestrians caused many municipalities to enact laws prohibiting their use. A further drawback of this device was that it had to be made to measure, manufactured to conform with the height and the stride of its rider, as none of its manufacturers are known to have built an adjustable version. After its brief moment in the limelight, the dandy-horse quickly faded into oblivion.

"However, in the 1860s in France, the vélocipède bicycle was created by attaching rotary cranks and pedals to the front-wheel hub of a dandy-horse" (Wikipedia article on Dandy horse, accessed 04-25-2009).

In 1859 The Base Ball Player's Pocket Companion: Containing Rules and Regulations for Forming Clubs, Directions for the "Massachusetts Game," and the "New York Game," from Official Reports was published in Boston by Mayhew & Baker. This small format 16mo of only 35 (1)pp. was the first book exclusively devoted to baseball, which began to become organized in the United States during the 1850s. By 1857 sixteen area clubs formed the sport's first governing body, the National Association of Base Ball Players.

The original flexible cloth binding on this anonymous work contained an illustration of a ball player stamped in gold on the upper cover. In October 2012 Between the Covers-Rare Books offered a very good copy of the original edition for $39,500.

In 1860 Anglo-American sports journalist Henry Chadwick issued Beadle's Dime Base-Ball Player: a Compendium of the Game Comprising Elementary Instructions of this American Game of Ball; together with the Revised Rules and Regulations for 1860. This handbook, written by Chadwick and published in New York by Irwin P. Beadle, was the first baseball guide published for sale to the general public. In this work Chadwick  

"listed totals of games played, outs, runs, home runs, and strikeouts for hitters on prominent clubs, the first database of its kind. His goal was to provide numerical evidence to prove what players helped or hurt a team to win. . . . He is credited with devising the baseball box score (which he adapted from the cricket scorecard) for reporting game events. The first box score was a grid with nine rows for players and nine columns for innings. The original box scores also created the often puzzling abbreviation for strikeout as 'K' - 'K' being the last letter of 'struck' in 'struck out.' The basic format and structure of the box score has changed little since the earliest of ones designed by Chadwick. He is also credited with devising such statistical measures as batting average and earned run average. Ironically, ERA originated not in the goal of measuring a pitcher's worth but to differentiate between runs caused by batting skill (hits) and lack of fielding skill (errors). He is also noted as believing fielding range to be a superior skill to avoiding errors" (Wikipedia article on Henry Chadwick, accessed 10-06-2012).

Canadian sports coach, physician, and innovator, James Naismith, invented basketball as an indoor sport to be played in winter by writing thirteen rules for the new sport and posting these rules in the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA gym. As far as I know, this is the only major sport in which the invention can be traced to a specific document.

"The first game of "Basket Ball" was played in December 1891. In a handwritten report, Naismith described the circumstances of the inaugural match; in contrast to modern basketball, the players played nine versus nine, handled a soccer ball, not a basketball, and instead of shooting at two hoops, the goals were a pair of peach baskets: 'When Mr. Stubbins brot [sic] up the peach baskets to the gym I secured them on the inside of the railing of the gallery. This was about 10 feet from the floor, one at each end of the gymnasium. I then put the 13 rules on the bulletin board just behind the instructor's platform, secured a soccer ball and awaited the arrival of the class... The class did not show much enthusiasm but followed my lead. . . I then explained what they had to do to make goals, tossed the ball up between the two center men & tried to keep them somewhat near the rules. Most of the fouls were called for running with the ball, though tackling the man with the ball was not uncommon.' In contrast to modern basketball, the original rules did not include what is known today as the dribble. Since the ball could only be moved up the court via a pass early players tossed the ball over their heads as they ran up court. Also, following each 'goal' a jump ball was taken in the middle of the court. Both practices are obsolete in the rules of modern basketball

"By 1892, basketball had grown so popular on campus that Dennis Horkenbach (editor-in-chief of The Triangle, the Springfield college newspaper) featured it in an article called 'A New Game', and there were calls to call this new game 'Naismith Ball', but Naismith refused. By 1893, basketball was introduced internationally by the YMCA movement. From Springfield, Naismith went to Denver where he acquired a medical degree and in 1898 he joined the University of Kansas faculty at Lawrence, Kansas" (Wikipedia article on James Naismith, accessed 12-11-2010).

♦ On December 10, 2010 Sotheby's in New York auctioned Naismith's original typewritten and hand-written manuscript of the rules which created basketball. To promote the sale, which benefited the Naismith Foundation, they published a separate catalogue which was available online. The document sold for $4,338,500, including buyer's premium. According to CBSsports.com, the buyers were David and Suzanne Booth, who intend to donate the manuscript to the University of Kansas at Lawrence where Naismith was the first basketball coach. Mr. Booth is an alumnus of the University of Kansas. The price was a record high for sports memorabilia.

In 1912 Spanish civil engineer and mathematician, and Director of the Laboratory of Applied Mechanics at the Ateneo Científico, Literario y Artístico de Madrid, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo built the first decision-making automaton — a chess-playing machine that pit the machine’s rook and king against the king of a human opponent.  Torres's machine, which he called El Ajedrecista (The Chessplayer) used electromagnets under the board to "play" the endgame rook and king against the lone king.

"Well, not precisely play. But the machine could, in a totally unassisted and automated fashion, deliver mate with King and Rook against King. This was possible regardless of the initial position of the pieces on the board. For the sake of simplicity, the algorithm used to calculate the positions didn't always deliver mate in the minimum amount of moves possible, but it did mate the opponent flawlessly every time. The machine, dubbed El Ajedrecista (Spanish for “the chessplayer”), was built in 1912 and made its public debut during the Paris World Fair of 1914, creating great excitement at the time. It used a mechanical arm to make its moves and electrical sensors to detect its opponent's replies." (http://www.chessbase.com/newsprint.asp?newsid=1799, accessed 10-31-2012).

The implications of Torres's machines were not lost on all observers. On November 6, 1915 Scientific American magazine in their Supplement 2079 pp. 296-298 published an illustrated article entitled "Torres and his Remarkable Automatic Devices. He Would Substitute Machinery for the Human Mind."

Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, economist and polymath John von Neumann then working at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, published "Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele" in Mathematische Annalen, 100, 295–300. This paper "On the Theory of Parlor Games" propounded the minimax theorem, inventing the theory of games.

Edwin Albert Link of Binghamton, New York designed and constructed  the Link Trainer, the first flight simulator, as a safe way to teach new pilots how to fly by instruments.

Link used his knowledge of pumps, valves and bellows to create a flight simulator that responded to the pilot's controls and gave an accurate reading on the included instruments.

Link Trainers became famous in World War II and were used by almost every combatant nation. The Link Company became a leader in flight simulation and training.

Between 1936 and 1939 electronic and acoustic engineer Homer Dudley and a team of engineers at Bell Labs produced the first electronic speech synthesizer, called the Voder ("Voice Operation DEmonstratoR").

The Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay, by experts who used a keyboard and foot pedals to play the machine and emit speech.

Project Whirlwind began as an analog flight simulator project at MIT.

Mathematician, physicist, and economist John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern published The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in Princeton at the University Press.

Quantitative mathematical models for games such as poker or bridge at one time appeared impossible, since games like these involve free choices by the players at each move, and each move reacts to the moves of other players. However, in the 1920s John von Neumann single-handedly invented game theory, introducing the general mathematical concept of "strategy" in a paper on games of chance (Mathematische Annalen 100 [1928] 295-320). This contained the proof of his "minimax" theorem that says "a strategy exists that guarantees, for each player, a maximum payoff assuming that the adversary acts so as to minimize that payoff." The "minimax" principle, a key component of the game-playing computer programs developed in the 1950s and 1960s by Arthur Samuel, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and others was more fully articulated and explored in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, co-authored by von Neumann and Morgenstern.

Game theory, which draws upon mathematical logic, set theory and functional analysis, attempts to describe in mathematical terms the decision-making strategies used in games and other competitive situations. The Von Neumann-Morgenstern theory assumes (1) that people's preferences will remain fixed throughout; (2) that they will have wide knowledge of all available options; (3) that they will be able to calculate their own best interests intelligently; and (4) that they will always act to maximize these interests. Attempts to apply the theory in real-world situations have been problematical, and the theory has been criticized by many, including AI pioneer Herbert Simon, as failing to model the actual decision-making process, which typically takes place in circumstances of relative ignorance where only a limited number of options can be explored.

Von Neumann revolutionized mathematical economics. Had he not suffered an early death from cancer in 1957, most probably he would have received the first Nobel Prize in economics. (The first Nobel prize in economics was awarded in 1969; it cannot be awarded posthumously.) Several mathematical economists influenced by von Neumann's ideas later received the Nobel Prize in economics. 

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 953.

A patented invention from 1947 called The Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device is probably the earliest interactive electronic game. American television pioneer Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. of Cedar Grove, New Jersey, and Estle Ray Mann constructed the game from analog electronics and a cathode ray tube (CRT) .

Goldsmith and Mann's patent application dated January 25, 1947

"describes a game of skill in which a player sits or stands facing a cathode ray tube (CRT) video screen mounted in a cabinet. Goldsmith and Mann designed the game to resemble a World War II radar display, but with airplanes or some other targets painted onto a transparent overlay (since this invention preceded the era of computer graphics).

"The player turns a control knob to position the CRT beam on the screen; to the player, the beam appears as a dot, which represents a reticle or scope. The player has a restricted amount of time in which to maneuver the dot so that it overlaps an airplane, and then to fire at the airplane by pressing a button. If the beam falls within the preprogrammed coordinates of a target when the user presses the button, then the CRT beam defocuses, simulating an explosion. . . ." (Wikipedia article on Cathode ray tube amusement device, accessed 02-29-2012).

U.S. Patent 2,455,992 which describes the device, granted to Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann in December 1948, and assigned to Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, is the earliest patent for an electronic game. The product was never commercially manufactured.

In 1948 mathematician Norbert Wiener at MIT published Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, a widely circulated and influential book that applied theories of information and communication to both biological systems and machines. Computer-related words with the “cyber” prefix, including "cyberspace," originate from Wiener’s book. Cybernetics was also the first conventionally published book to discuss electronic digital computing. Writing as a mathematician rather than an engineer, Wiener’s discussion was theoretical rather than specific. Strangely the first edition of the book was published in English in Paris at the press of Hermann et Cie. The first American edition was printed offset from the French sheets and issued by John Wiley in New York, also in 1948. I have never seen an edition printed or published in England. 

Independently of Claude Shannon, Wiener conceived of communications engineering as a brand of statistical physics and applied this viewpoint to the concept of information. Wiener's chapter on "Time series, information, and communication" contained the first publication of Wiener's formula describing the probability density of continuous information. This was remarkably close to Shannon's formula dealing with discrete time published in A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948). Cybernetics also contained a chapter on "Computing machines and the nervous system." This was a theoretical discussion, influenced by McCulloch and Pitts, of differences and similarities between information processing in the electronic computer and the human brain. It contained a discussion of the difference between human memory and the different computer memories then available. Tacked on at the end of Cybernetics were speculations by Wiener about building a chess-playing computer, predating Shannon's first paper on the topic.

Cybernetics is a peculiar, rambling blend of popular and highly technical writing, ranging from history to philosophy, to mathematics, to information and communication theory, to computer science, and to biology. Reflecting the amazingly wide range of the author's interests, it represented an interdisciplinary approach to information systems both in biology and machines. It influenced a generation of scientists working in a wide range of disciplines. In it were the roots of various elements of computer science, which by the mid-1950s had broken off from cybernetics to form their own specialties. Among these separate disciplines were information theory, computer learning, and artificial intelligence.

It is probable that Wiley had Hermann et Cie supervise the typesetting because they specialized in books on mathematics.  Hermann printed the first edition by letterpress; the American edition was printed offset from the French sheets. Perhaps because the typesetting was done in France Wiener did not have the opportunity to read proofs carefully, as the first edition contained many typographical errors which were repeated in the American edition, and which remained uncorrected through the various printings of the American edition until a second edition was finally published by John Wiley and MIT Press in 1961. 

Though the book contained a lot of technical mathematics, and was not written for a popular audience, the first American edition went through at least 5 printings during 1948,  and several later printings, most of which were probably not read in their entirety by purchasers. Sales of Wiener's book were helped by reviews in wide circulation journals such as the review in TIME Magazine on December 27, 1948, entitled "In Man's Image." The reviewer used the word calculator to describe the machines; at this time the word computer was reserved for humans.

"Some modern calculators 'remember' by means of electrical impulses circulating for long periods around closed circuits. One kind of human memory is believed to depend on a similar system: groups of neurons connected in rings. The memory impulses go round & round and are called upon when needed. Some calculators use 'scanning' as in television. So does the brain. In place of the beam of electrons which scans a television tube, many physiologists believe, the brain has 'alpha waves': electrical surges, ten per second, which question the circulating memories.

"By copying the human brain, says Professor Wiener, man is learning how to build better calculating machines. And the more he learns about calculators, the better he understands the brain. The cyberneticists are like explorers pushing into a new country and finding that nature, by constructing the human brain, pioneered there before them.

"Psychotic Calculators. If calculators are like human brains, do they ever go insane? Indeed they do, says Professor Wiener. Certain forms of insanity in the brain are believed to be caused by circulating memories which have got out of hand. Memory impulses (of worry or fear) go round & round, refusing to be suppressed. They invade other neuron circuits and eventually occupy so much nerve tissue that the brain, absorbed in its worry, can think of nothing else.

"The more complicated calculating machines, says Professor Wiener, do this too. An electrical impulse, instead of going to its proper destination and quieting down dutifully, starts circulating lawlessly. It invades distant parts of the mechanism and sets the whole mass of electronic neurons moving in wild oscillations" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,886484-2,00.html, accessed 03-05-2009).

Presumably the commercial success of Cybernetics encouraged Wiley to publish Berkeley's Giant Brains, or Machines that Think in 1949.

♦ In October 2012 I offered for sale the copy of the first American printing of Cybernetics that Wiener inscribed to Jerry Wiesner, the head of the laboratory at MIT where Wiener conducted his research. This was the first inscribed copy of the first edition (either the French or American first) that I had ever seen on the market, though the occasional signed copy of the American edition did turn up. Having read our catalogue description of that item, my colleague Arthur Freeman emailed me this story pertinent to Wiener's habit of not inscribing books:

"Norbert, whom I grew up nearby (he visited our converted barn in Belmont, Mass., constantly to play frantic theoretical blackboard math with my father, an economist/statistician at MIT, which my mother, herself a bit better at pure math, would have to explain to him later), was a notorious cheapskate. His wife once persuaded him to invite some colleagues out for a beer at the Oxford Grill in Harvard Square, which he did, and after a fifteen-minute sipping session, he got up to go, and solemnly collected one dime each from each of his guests. So when *Cybernetics* appeared on the shelves of the Harvard Coop Bookstore, my father was surprised and flattered that Norbert wanted him to have an inscribed copy, and together they went to Coop, where Norbert duly picked one out, wrote in it, and carried it to the check-out counter--where he ceremoniously handed it over to my father to pay for. This was a great topic of family folklore. I wonder if Jerry Wiesner paid for his copy too?"

In 1950 Jule Charney, Agnar Fjörtoff, and John von Neumann published “Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation,” Tellus 2 (1950) 237-254.

Charney, Fjörthoff, and von Neumann's paper reported the first weather forecast by electronic computer. It took twenty-four hours of processing time on the ENIAC to calculate a twenty-four hour forecast.

"As a committed opponent of Communism and a key member of the WWII-era national security establishment, von Neumann hoped that weather modeling might lead to weather control, which might be used as a weapon of war. Soviet harvests, for example, might be ruined by a US-induced drought.

"Under grants from the Weather Bureau, the Navy, and the Air Force, he assembled a group of theoretical meteorologists at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). If regional weather prediction proved feasible, von Neumann planned to move on to the extremely ambitious problem of simulating the entire atmosphere. This, in turn, would allow the modeling of climate. Jule Charney, an energetic and visionary meteorologist who had worked with Carl-Gustaf Rossby at the University of Chicago and with Arnt Eliassen at the University of Oslo, was invited to head the new Meteorology Group.

"The Meteorology Project ran its first computerized weather forecast on the ENIAC in 1950. The group's model, like [Lewis Fry] Richardson's, divided the atmosphere into a set of grid cells and employed finite difference methods to solve differential equations numerically. The 1950 forecasts, covering North America, used a two-dimensional grid with 270 points about 700 km apart. The time step was three hours. Results, while far from perfect, justified further work" (Paul N. Edwards [ed], Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling: A Participatory History, accessed 04-26-2009).

Claude Shannon published Programming a computer for playing chess, the first technical paper on computer chess. (See Reading 11.3.)

In February 1951 British computer scientist Christopher Strachey finished a program for the game of draughts, or checkers. The game ran for the first time on the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, on July 30, 1951, but completely exhausted the machine's memory.

"When Strachey heard about the Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow-student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the operation codes of that machine by around October 1951. The program could 'play a complete game of draughts at a reasonable speed' " (Wikipedia article on Christopher Strachey, accessed 09-12-2012).

In 1952 A. S. Douglas wrote Noughts and Crosses, the first graphical computer game, on the cathode ray tube (CRT) screen of the EDSAC at Cambridge University.

William Higinbotham, head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, invented the first video game, "Tennis for Two" run on an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope.

Allan Newell, Clifford Shaw, and Herbert Simon invented “game tree pruning,” an artificial intelligence technique.

Arthur Lee Samuel published "Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers," IBM Journal of Research and Development 3 (1959) no. 3, 210-29. In this work Samuel demonstrated that machines can learn from past errors — one of the earliest examples of non-numerical computation.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 874.

Programmer and computer scientist Steve Russell, aka Steve "Slug" Russell, and his team at MIT, including members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, took about 200 hours to program the first computer game for a commercially available computer on a DEC PDP-1.

Inspired by the space battles in the Lensman serial of science fiction space opera by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the computer game, or videogame, was called Spacewar .

Demonstration of DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers), a joint development effort between General Motors in Detroit, and IBM, which began development in 1959. This was the first computer-assisted design (CAD) program.

In 1963 Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, working on the experimental TX- 2 computer, created the first graphical user interface, or first interactive graphics program, in his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. 

Sketchpad was an early application of vector graphics.

Paul Tenczar developed the TUTOR programming language for use in developing electronic learning programs called "lessons" for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has "powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics and features to stimulate handling student records and statistics by instructors." This also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons— that is, games—including flight simulators, war games, role-playing, such as Dungeons and Dragons (dnd), card games, word games, and Medical lesson games.

The first documentation of the TUTOR language, under this name, appears to be The TUTOR Manual, CERL Report X-4, by R. A. Avner and P. Tenczar, January 1969.

In 1968 Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, created the first Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) head mounted display system.

Sutherland's head mounted display was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the formidable appearance of the device inspired its name—the Sword of Damocles. The system was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe rooms.

Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, both professors at the University of Utah, founded Evans & Sutherland to commercialize the use of computers as simulators for training purposes.

The earliest known coin-operated computer or video game, Galaxy Game, was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, two months before the release of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game. Only one unit was built initially, although the game later included several consoles allowing users to play against each other.

"The game was programmed by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. Like Computer Space, it was a version of the existing Spacewar!, which had been created in the early 1960s on the PDP-1 and ported to a variety of platforms since then. The coin-operated game console incorporated a Digital PDP-11/20 with vector displays. The hardware cost around $20,000, and a game cost 10 cents or three games for 25 cents. In June 1972 the hardware was improved to allow the processor to power four to eight consoles. The game remained popular on campus, with wait times for players as much as one hour, until it was removed in May 1979 due to damaged screens.

"The unit was restored in 1997 and now resides in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California" (Wikipedia article on Computer Space, accessed 08-26-2009).

Lowood, "Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong, " IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31 (2009) #3, 5-19.

Nutting Associates of Mountain View, California, released the video arcade game Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was an adaptation of Spacewar (1962).

Computer Space was the first commercially sold coin-operated video game, predating the Magnavox Odyssey by six months, and Atari's Pong by one year.

The first home video game console, the Magavox Odyssey, which used a television screen as a display, was first demonstrated on May 24, 1972 and released in August of that year, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years. The Odyssey was designed by Ralph Baer, who began development around 1966 and had a working prototype finished by 1968.

This prototype, known as the Brown Box, is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Nolan Bushnell  and Ted Dabney founded  Atari in Sunnyvale, California, and hired Al Alcorn to program the table tennis (ping-pong) game “PONG.”

Pong was the first commercially successful video game (videogame).

Lowood, "Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31, #3 (2009) 5-19.

Stewart Brand published "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" in Rolling Stone magazine.

"The first 'Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics' will be held here, Wednesday 19 October, 2000 hours. First prize will be a year's subscription to 'Rolling Stone'. The gala event will be reported by Stone Sports reporter Stewart Brand & photograhed by Annie Liebowitz. Free Beer!

"Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.  

"That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers — Threat or menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

"Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.  

"Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That’s the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)  

"October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI’s PDP-10 computer. AI’s Head System Programmer and most avid Spacewar nut, Ralph Gorin, faces a display screen which says only:  

"THIS CONSOLE AVAILABLE. . . ."

(http://downlode.org/Etext/Spacewar/, accessed 02-25-2010).

Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars or simply Maze) was the first networked, 3D multi-user first person shooter game.

"Maze first brought us the concept of online players as eyeball "avatars" chasing each other around in a maze). From its humble 1973-1974 origins on the Imlacs PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, to its life in project MAC at MIT, on Xerox Altos and "D* Machines" running on early ethernet, to versions ported to Mac, NeXT and PalmOS, Maze started it all. Today's massively multiuser 3D games owe a great debt to Maze and those who created and kept on porting it to new systems for the past 30 years. Maze is the reason why nobody can claim ownership of the rights to the invention of a multi-user 3D Cyberspace and is another of the major gifts to innovation made by early net pioneers" (Digibarn Computer Museum, accessed 04-15-2009)

Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, wrote the first computer role-playing game in the TUTOR programming language for the PLATO system. It was called Dungeons & Dragons (dnd).

At Evans & Sutherland in Salt Lake City, Utah, John Warnock and John Gaffney developed the "The Evans and Sutherland Design System" for producing 3-dimensional graphical databases both for the Evans & Sutherland CAD/CAM Picture System and for custom-built simulation machines. 

These graphics systems used a graphics model, developed by Ivan Sutherland and others, based on coordinate system transformations and line drawing.

"John Warnock joined Xerox PARC in 1978 to work for Charles "Chuck" Geschke. There he teamed up with Martin Newell in producing an interpreted graphics system called JAM. "JAM" stands for "John And Martin". JAM had the same postfix execution semantics as Gaffney's Design System, and was based on the Evans and Sutherland imaging model, but augmented the E&S imaging model by providing a much more extensive set of graphics primitives. Like the later versions of the Design System, JAM was "token based" rather than "command line based", which means that the JAM interpreter reads a stream of input tokens and processes each token completely before moving to the next. Newell and Warnock implemented JAM on various Xerox workstations; by 1981 JAM was available at Stanford on the Xerox Alto computers, where I first saw it.  

"In the meantime, various people at Xerox were building a series of experimental raster printers. The first of these was called XGP, the Xerox Graphics Printer, and had a resolution of 192 dots to the inch. Xerox made XGP's available to certain universities, and by 1972 they were in use at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and the University of Toronto. Each of those organizations produced its own hardware and software interfaces. The XGP is historically interesting only because it is the first raster printer to gain substantial use by computer scientists, and was the arena in which a lot of mistakes were made and a lot of lessons learned.  

"To replace the XGP, Xerox PARC developed a new printer called EARS, and then another newer printer called Dover. After the agony of converting software from XGP to EARS, various Xerox people realized that applications programs generating files for the XGP or for EARS should not be tied to the device properties of the printer itself. Bob Sproull and William Newman, of Xerox PARC, developed a relatively device-independent page image description scheme, called "Press format", which was used to instruct raster printers what to print.  

"As part of an extensive grant program to selected universities, Xerox donated Dover printers and made documentation of the Press format available under a nondisclosure agreement. As far as I know, that nondisclosure agreement has never been lifted, though information about Press format has been widely enough distributed that by 1982 researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) at Lausanne had given conference papers about their own independent implementation of Press format.  

"Press format was a smashing success; it revolutionized laser printing technology in the academic and research communities, and stimulated a large number of people to think about issues of device-independent print graphics. Nevertheless, Press format had its limitations, and various people felt the need to revise the basic design.  

"Sproull left Xerox in 1978 to become a professor of computer science at CMU. Newman returned home to England to become an independent consultant. Martin Newell left Xerox to join Cadlinc Corp. Warnock and Geschke remained at Xerox.  

"While at CMU, Sproull began making plans for a new version of Press that would combine the graphics model of JAM with the page image description properties of Press. Sproull returned to Xerox for a sabbatical leave in 1982, and enlisted the help of Butler Lampson in the creation of the new page image description language that Warnock dubbed "Interpress". The name caught on.  

"While it is difficult to separate the contributions made by Sproull and Lampson, it is not incorrect to say that Lampson and Warnock produced the execution model of Interpress while Sproull and Warnock produced the imaging model. It is also approximately correct to characterize this first version of Interpress as being derived from the graphics model and execution model of JAM with additional protection and security mechanisms derived from experience with programming languages like Euclid and Cedar, and a careful silence on the issue of fonts. The trio worked under Geschke's direction, and Geschke was responsible for refereeing disagreements and for making certain that the resulting design was acceptable to the rest of Xerox" (Brian Reid, http://groups.google.com/group/fa.laser-lovers/msg/5d0df32a0e91f1fa?rnum=2&pli=1, accessed 01-07-2009).

Spelunker and programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, William Crowther wrote the first computer text adventure game, Adventure.

Adventure was originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in its operating system.  The game was renamed Colossal Cave Adventure, as it was based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.

"Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge."

"Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. (See the original source code) The program required about 60K words (nearly 300KB) of core memory in order to run, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128K words." (Wikipedia article on Colossal Cave Adventure, accessed 04-14-2009).

"In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPAnet,  and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 5.0 OS. The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command 'xyzzy', which is now included as an Easter Egg in games such as Minesweeper" (Wikipedia article on Interactive fiction, accessed 04-15-2009).

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene—a "community" specializing in the distribution of pirated content—started emerging around this time. It was used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups who made their work public on privately run BBS systems.

"The first BBSes were located in the USA, but similar boards started appearing in the UK, Australia and mainland Europe. At the time setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not a trivial matter and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for the technical challenge. The BBS systems typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later applications" (Wikipedia article on the Warez scene, accessed 07-20-2009).

Atari of Sunnyvale, California, released the Home Pong video game console through the Sears catalogue.

Home Pong used a television as a monitor. The success of this product resulted in a patent infringement lawsuit from the manufacturers of the Magnavox Odyssey video game console.

Nolan Bushnell and Atari, Sunnyvale, California, introduced the Atari Video Computer System ( VCS).

Later known as the Atari 2600, VCS was the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. It was "typically bundled with two joystick constrollers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a cartridge game."

The first multi-user or multi-player computer games, or MUDs began to evolve on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  The PLATO MUDs ran on a bulletin board system or Internet server and combined "elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games, and social chat rooms."

Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling at MIT wrote the interactive fiction text adventure game Zork in the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10.

"Zork" was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program. The implementors named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time the name Zork had already stuck.

Zork was the first text adventure game to see widespread commercial release.

Mattel Auto Race, the first handheld electronic game that was entirely digital, without moving mechanisms except controls and on/off switch, was introduced in 1977 by Mattel of El Segundo, California.

Roberta and Ken Williams wrote Mystery House for the Apple II. Containing 70 simple two-dimensional drawings by Roberta Williams,  Mystery House was the first computer adventure game with graphics.  

The game was also eventually released into the public domain.

♦ In the iTunes Store for iPhone and iPod Touch you could buy version 1.0.2 of the program at this link (accessed 12-30-2009):

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=307511510&mt=8

Engineering student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Bruce A. Artwick released A2-FS1 Flight Simulator for the Apple II personal computer through his subLOGIC Corporation. This was the first flight simulator program for a personal computer. 

Artwick began the project by writing a series of articles on flight simulation using computer graphics during 1976. When a magazine editor told him that subscribers were interested in purchasing such a program Artwick founded subLOGIC Corporation to commercialize his ideas. At first the company sold simulators by mail order, but that changed with the related of Flight Simulator FS1, for the Apple II, followed by a release in March 1980 for the TRS-80 with lower quality graphics.

♦ You can view a dynamic simulation of the original program at the Wikipedia at this link.

The arcade video game Pac-Man was first released in Japan by Namco on May 22, 1980.

"Originally launched in 1979 [sic], Namco's Pac-Man quickly became the most popular video game of all time. Pac-Man launched a global phenomenon, featuring the medium's biggest star character (and Mad Magazine's Man of the Year 1982). The title also gave birth to the 80's arcade culture while riding a wave of merchandising that reached Saturday Morning Cartoons, toys, pajamas and Pac-Man Fever, a beloved Top 40 record. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pac-Man must have one hell of an ego -- the format was borrowed, evolved or outright stolen by dozens of imitators, and remains a staple of arcade collections and mobile time diversions today. Though its gameplay heritage doesn't influence many games anymore, it's hard to imagine another game ever having the global impact of Pac-Man" (Video-Pro.com, The 52 Most Important Video Games of All time, No. 6. accessed 04-15-2009).

Commodore International, West Chester, Pennsylvania, issued the Commodore 64 — "the first cheap home computer" at the price of $595.

The Commodore 64 looked like a bulky keyboard, but included color graphics, and excelled at playing early video games. Between 1982 and 1984 30,000,000 units were sold, making it the best-selling personal computer model of this era. Roughly 10,000 commercial programs were produced for this computer.

Having obtained a license from subLOGIC Corporation to port Flight Simulator FS-1 to IBM PCs and compatibles, Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington, released the program as Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0. 

♦ You can download films on the history of subLOGIC/Microsoft Flight Simulator made in 2010 and 2006 from the Wikipedia article on the History of Microsoft Flight Simulator (accessed 11-30-2010).

Control Video Corporation founded by William van Miester, of the Washington D.C. area, offered video games "by telephone" for Atari VCS game machine owners through a service called GameLine. Using variable speed adaptive modem technology, GameLine planned other services for the millions of game machine owners who might upgrade their units with programmable adaptors. The company nearly went bankrupt. After revamping its product line, the company changed its name to Quantum Computer Services in 1985.

In 1991 the company was renamed America Online (AOL).

The Sanskrit word "avatar" was probably first used to denote the computer representation of a user as the name for the player character in the computer role-playing game, Avatar IV, Quest of the Avatar, developed for the Apple II by Origin Systems, Austin, Texas.

Nintendo, Kyoto, Japan, introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System, and 8-bit game console. It was accompanied by Super Mario Bros., the best-selling video game as of 2008 with 40,000,000 copies sold.

"In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.  

"It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the Computer," The New York Review of Books 57 February 11, 2010.

Computer game designer Chris Crawford held the first meeting of the Computer Games Developers Conference in his San Jose, California living room. About 27 game designers attended.

Mitchell Kapor, John Gilmore, and John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, California, to defend individual rights in the digital world. The three had met on The Well.

Motivation for creation of the organization was the

“massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service early in 1990.” The first successful achievement of the new foundation was to lay “the groundwork for the successful representation of Steven Jackson Games (SJG) in a Federal court case to prosecute the United States Secret Service for unlawfully raiding their offices and seizing computers.”

At the Second Man-Machine World Championship, Chinook, a computer checkers program developed around 1989 at the University of Alberta by a team led by Jonathan Schaeffer, won due to human frailty.

This was the first time that a computer program defeated a human champion in a game competition.  "In 1996 the Guinness Book of World Records recognized Chinook as the first program to win a human world championship" (http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/project/, accessed 01-24-2010).

The Unites States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, decided Steve Jackson Games v. U.S. Secret Service,36 F.3d 457 (5th Cir. 1994).

"The narrow issue before us is whether the seizure of a computer, used to operate an electronic bulletin board system, and containing private electronic mail which had been sent to (stored on) the bulletin board, but not read (retrieved) by the intended recipients, constitutes an unlawful intercept under the Federal Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. s 2510, et seq., as amended by Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Pub.L. No. 99-508, Title I, 100 Stat. 1848 (1986). We hold that it is not, and therefore AFFIRM."

Sony launched its first PlayStation game console in Japan.

Gary Kasparov, sometimes regarded as the greatest chess player of all time, resigned 19 moves into Game 6 against Deep Blue, an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer capable of calculating 200 million chess positions per second. This was the first time that a human world chess champion lost to a computer under tournament conditions.

The event was broadcast live from IBM's website via a Java viewer, and became the world's record "Net event" at the time.

"The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind:  

" 'By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.'

"It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the Computer," The New York Review of Books, 57, February 11, 2010).

Database consultant Hank Estrin created and made operational Where's George?, a website that tracked the natural geographic circulation of American paper money.

"A hit is when a bill registered with Where's George? is re-entered into the database. Where's George? does not have specific goals other than tracking currency movements, but many users like to collect interesting patterns of hits, called bingos. The most common bingo involves getting at least one hit in all 50 states (called "50 State Bingo"). Another Bingo, FRB Bingo, is when a user gets hits on bills from all 12 Federal Reserve Banks.

"Most bills do not receive any responses, or hits, but many bills receive two or more hits. The average hit rate is slightly over 11.1%. Double- and triple-hitters are common, and bills with 4 or 5 hits are not unheard of. Almost daily a bill receives its 6th hit. The site record is held by a $1 bill with 15 entries.

"To increase the chance of having a bill reported, users (called "Georgers") may write or stamp text on the bills encouraging bill finders to visit www.wheresgeorge.com and track the bill's travels. Bills that are entered into the database, but not marked, are known as stealths" (Wikipedia article on Where's George, accessed 05-04-2009).

On July 11, 2011 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a computer animated (CGI) science fiction film byJapanese game designer, game director and game producer Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games, was released in the United States by Columbia Pictures. This film, produced by Square Pictures, Honolulu, Hawaii, was the first attempt to make a photorealistic rendered 3D feature film.

"Square Pictures rendered the film using some of the most advanced processing capabilities available for film animating at the time. A render farm consisting of 960 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's 141,964 frames. It took a staff of 200 and some four years to complete the film. Square intended to make the character of Aki Ross into the world's first photorealistic computer-animated actress, with plans for appearances in multiple films in different roles. 

"The Spirits Within debuted to mixed critical reception, but was widely praised for the realism of the computer-animated characters. Due to rising costs, the film greatly exceeded its original budget towards the end of production, reaching a final cost of US$137 million, of which it made back only $85 million at the box office. The film has been called a box office bomb, and is blamed for the demise of Square Pictures" (Wikipedia article on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, accessed 03-23-2012).

"Roger Ebert was a strong advocate of the film; he gave the film 3 1/2 stars out of 4, praising it as a "technical milestone" while conceding that its 'nuts and bolts' story lacked 'the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's A.I.'. He also expressed a desire for the film to succeed in hopes of seeing more films made in its image, though he was skeptical of its ability to be accepted" (Wikipedia article on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, accessed 05-05-2009).

Microsoft launched the Xbox game console, its first entry into the gaming console market.

"According to the book Smartbomb, by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, the remarkable success of the upstart Sony PlayStation worried Microsoft in late 1990s. The growing video game market seemed to threaten the PC market which Microsoft had dominated and relied upon for most of its revenues. Additionally, a venture into the gaming console market would diversify Microsoft's product line, which up to that time had been heavily concentrated on software."

Paul Marino founded the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences in New York.

"So, what is Machinima?

"Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies.  

"In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real-world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence. By combining the techniques of filmmaking, animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game engines, Machinima makes for a very cost- and time-efficient way to produce films, with a large amount of creative control" (http://www.machinima.org/machinima-faq.html, accessed 02-25-2010).

Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin founded the group blog Grand Text Auto. It was 
"about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms: interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, shared virtual environments, and more."

In May 2009 GTxA became "an aggregator for a distributed group of blogs in which we participate. The authors of these blogs work as both theorists and developers, and are interested in authorship, design, and technology, as well as issues of interaction and reception."

Sony's PlayStation and PS 1 reached "a combined total of 102.49 million units shipped", becoming the first video game console to reach the 100 million mark.

In February 2006, as part of their celebration of their 200th issue, Electronic Gaming Monthly ranked, in ascending order of importance, "The Greatest 200 Videogames of their Time."

Vital US infrastructure, including power grids and banking systems, were put under simulated attack in a week-long security exercise called Cyber Storm.

♦ FROM THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S PUBLISHED INTERPRETATION OF THE RESULTS

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) successfully executed Cyber Storm, the first national cyber exercise Feb. 6 thru Feb. 10, 2006. The exercise was the first government-led, full-scale cyber security exercise of its kind. NCSD, a division within the department’s Preparedness Directorate, provides the federal government with a centralized cyber security coordination and preparedness function called for in the National Strategy for Homeland Security, the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7. NCSD is the focal point for the federal government’s interaction with state and local government, the private sector and the international community concerning cyberspace vulnerability reduction efforts."

"The Scenario

"The exercise simulated a sophisticated cyber attack campaign through a series of scenarios directed at several critical infrastructure sectors. The intent of these scenarios was to highlight the interconnectedness of cyber systems with physical infrastructure and to exercise coordination and communication between the public and private sectors. Each scenario was developed with the assistance of industry experts and was executed in a closed and secure environment.

"Cyber Storm scenarios had three major adversarial objectives:

"* To disrupt specifically targeted critical infrastructure through cyber attacks

"* To hinder the governments' ability to respond to the cyber attacks

"* To undermine public confidence in the governments' ability to provide and protect service" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1158340980371.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

♦ A LESS OPTIMISTIC INTERPRETATION FROM THE WIKIPEDIA

"The Cyber Storm exercise was a simulated exercise overseen by the Department of Homeland Security that took place February 6 through February 10, 2006 with the purpose of testing the nations defenses against digital espionage. The simulation was targeted primarily at American security organizations but officials from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand participated as well.

"Simulation

"The exercise simulated a large scale attack on critical digital infrastructure such as communications, transportation, and energy production. The simulation took place a series of incidents which included.

" * Washington's metro trains mysteriously shutting down.

" * Bloggers revealing locations of railcars containing hazardous materials. * The airport control towers of Philadelphia and Chicago mysteriously shutting down.

" * A mysterious liquid appearing on a London subway.

" * Significant numbers of people on "no fly" lists suddenly appearing at airports all over the nation.

" * Planes flying too close to the White House. * Water utilities in Los Angeles getting compromised.

"Internal difficulties

"During the exercise the computers running the simulation came under attack by the players themselves. Heavily censored files released to the Associated Press reveal that at some time during the exercise the organizers sent every one involved an e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" telling the participants in the simulation not to attack the game's control computers.

"Performance of participants

"The Cyber Storm exercise highlighted the gaps and shortcomings of the nation's cyber defenses. The cyber storm exercise report found that institutions under attack had a hard time getting the bigger picture and instead focused on single incidents treating them as 'individual and discrete.'

"In light of the test the Department of Homeland Security raised concern that the relatively modest resources assigned to cyber-defense would be 'overwhelmed in a real attack' (Wikipedia article on Cyber Storm Exercise, accessed 08-09-2009).

Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta announced that the game of checkers was "solved". Perfect play leads to a draw.

"The crucial part of Schaeffer's computer proof involved playing out every possible endgame involving fewer than 10 pieces. The result is an endgame database of 39 trillion positions. By contrast, there are only 19 different opening moves in draughts. Schaeffer's proof shows that each of these leads to a draw in the endgame database, providing neither player makes a mistake.  

"Schaeffer was able to get his result by searching only a subset of board positions rather than all of them, since some of them can be considered equivalent. He carried out a mere 1014 calculations to complete the proof in under two decades. 'This pushes the envelope as far as artificial intelligence is concerned,' he says.  

"At its peak, Schaeffer had 200 desktop computers working on the problem full time, although in later years he reduced this to 50 or so. 'The problem is such that if I made a mistake 10 years ago, all the work from then on would be wrong,' says Schaeffer. 'So I've been fanatical about checking for errors.' " (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12296-checkers-solved-after-years-of-number-crunching.html, accessed 01-24-2010).

Based on this proof, Schaeffer's checkers-playing program Chinook, can no longer be beaten. The best an opponent can hope for is a draw.

Imperial College Medical School, London, developed Phase I - Game-based learning for Virtual Patients in Second Life.

"The four-dimensional framework described by De Freitas and Martin (2006), plus the learning types described by Helmer (2007), as well as the different aspects of emergent narrative described by Murray (1997) have provided the basis for the design of these game-based learning activities for virtual patients under two different categories: context and learner specification, and narrative and modes of representation. Phase I of this project focused on the delivery of a virtual patient in the area of Respiratory Medicine following a game-based learning model in Second Life."

You can watch the video of Phase 1 on YouTube at this link.

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is conducting the largest cyber security exercise ever organized. Cyber Storm II is being held from March 10-14 in Washington, D.C. and brings together participants from federal, state and local governments, the private sector, and the international community.

"Cyber Storm II is the second in a series of congressionally mandated exercises that will examine the nation’s cyber security preparedness and response capabilities. The exercise will simulate a coordinated cyber attack on information technology, communications, chemical, and transportation systems and assets.

" 'Securing cyberspace is vital to maintaining America’s strategic interests, public safety, and economic prosperity,' said Greg Garcia, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications. 'Exercises like Cyber Storm II help to ensure that the public and private sectors are prepared for an effective response to attacks against our critical systems and networks.'

"Cyber Storm II will include 18 federal departments and agencies, nine states (Calif., Colo., Del., Ill., Mich., N.C., Pa., Texas and Va.), five countries (United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom), and more than 40 private sector companies. They include ABB, Inc., Air Products, Cisco, Dow Chemical Company Inc., Harris Corporation, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Microsoft, NeuStar, PPG Industries, and Wachovia" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1205180340404.shtm, accessed 08-09-2009).

David Ferrucci, leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM's T. J. Watson's Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, Eric Nyberg, and several co-authors published IBM Research Report: Towards the Open Advancement of Question Answering Systems.

Section 4.2.3. of the report includes an analysis of why the television game show Jeopardy! provides a good model of the semantic analysis and integration problem.

IBM's Watson Question Answering (QA) System will challenge humans in the television quiz show Jeopardy!

"IBM is working to build a computing system that can understand and answer complex questions with enough precision and speed to compete against some of the best Jeopardy! contestants out there.

"This challenge is much more than a game. Jeopardy! demands knowledge of a broad range of topics including history, literature, politics, film, pop culture and science. What's more, Jeopardy! clues involve irony, riddles, analyzing subtle meaning and other complexities at which humans excel and computers traditionally do not. This, along with the speed at which contestants have to answer, makes Jeopardy! an enormous challenge for computing systems. Code-named "Watson" after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the IBM computing system is designed to rival the human mind's ability to understand the actual meaning behind words, distinguish between relevant and irrelevant content, and ultimately, demonstrate confidence to deliver precise final answers.

"Known as a Question Answering (QA) system among computer scientists, Watson has been under development for more than three years. According to Dr. David Ferrucci, leader of the project team, 'The confidence processing ability is key to winning at Jeopardy! and is critical to implementing useful business applications of Question Answering.

"Watson will also incorporate massively parallel analytical capabilities and, just like human competitors, Watson will not be connected to the Internet, or have any other outside assistance.  

"If we can teach a computer to play Jeopardy!, what could it mean for science, finance, healthcare and business? By drastically advancing the field of automatic question answering, the Watson project's ultimate success will be measured not by daily doubles, but by what it means for society" (http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/index.shtml, accessed 06-16-2010).

On June 16, 2010 The New York Times Magazine published a long article by Clive Thompson on IBM's Watson's challenge of humans in Jeopardy! entitled, in the question response language of Jeopardy!, "What is I.B.M.'s Watson?."

♦ Link to to FAQs concerning Watson and Jeopardy! on IBM's website, accessed 02-08-2011: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/faq.shtml.

"As employment headlines go from grim to grimmer, it’s appropriate that one job category with expanding demand involves helping people avoid reality. Designers of computer simulations are sought in many fields to help understand complex, multifaceted phenomena that are too expensive or perilous to study in real life."

Bill Waite, chairman of the AEgis Technologies Group, a Huntsville, Ala., company that creates simulations for various military and civilian applications, "estimates that 400,000 people make a living in the United States in one aspect or another of simulation" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/jobs/14starts.html?8dpc, accessed 06-22-2009).

Barry Collins, news, features, and online editor of PCPro wrote in PCPro.co.uk "Whatever Happened to Second Life?"

"Three years ago, I underwent one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life – and I barely even left the office.  

"I spent a week virtually living and breathing inside Second Life: the massively multiplayer online world that contains everything from lottery games to libraries, penthouses to pubs, skyscrapers to surrogacy clinics.

"Oh, and an awful lot of virtual sex.  

"Back then, the world and his dog were falling over themselves to “be a part of it”. Rock stars were queuing up to play virtual gigs, Microsoft and IBM were setting up elaborate pixellated offices to host staff training seminars, Reuters even despatched a correspondent to report back on the latest in-world developments.

"At its peak, the Second Life economy had more money swilling about than several third-world countries. It had even produced its own millionaire, Anshe Chung, who made a very real fortune from buying and selling property that existed only on Second Life servers.  

"Three years on, and the hype has been extinguished. Second Life has seen its status as the web wonderchild supplanted by Facebook and Twitter. The newspapers have forgotten about it, the Reuters correspondent has long since cleared his virtual desk, and you can walk confidently around tech trade shows without a ponytailed “Web 2.0 Consultant” offering to put your company on the Second Life map for the price of a company car.  "

"But what has happened to Second Life? Have the hundreds of thousands of registered players logged off and found a real life? Has the Second Life economy collapsed? And what’s become of the extroverts, entrepreneurs and evangelists I encountered on my first visit? There’s only one way to find out. I’m going back in."

"Has Second Life become a digital ghost town? Not according to its makers, Linden Labs. 'In total, users around the world have spent more than one billion hours in Second Life,' the company claimed in September 

"And it isn’t just using that big figure to distract attention from a slowing interest in the online world: 'user hours grew 33% year-on-year to an all-time high of 126 million in Q2 2009,' Linden insists."

"A little research soon reveals why Second Life seems a lot quieter than the numbers suggest. In June, the company opened Zindra – Second Life’s 'adult continent', a huge plot of the virtual universe dedicated to content rated as 'mature', 'adult' or even 'PG'.  

"Given that sex and gambling accounted for the majority of the 'most popular places' when I first visited, it was suddenly apparent why I was as lonely as a cloud in the parts of the Second Life universe that wouldn’t upset the clergy.  

"So why did Linden establish its very own red-light district? It seems the company decided it was time to clean up its act. In 2008, a management shake-up saw founder and CEO Philip Rosedale move into the role of chairman; his replacement was Mark Kingdon, a man who spent 12 years as a partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers – about as far from Linden’s 'anything goes' culture as you could possibly get."

"Kingdon apparently realised that companies such as IBM (which has more than 50 in-game properties) and Microsoft don’t want their reputations sullied by being part of a virtual world where XXX DANA’S NAUGHTY PLAYHOUSE XXX is the star attraction.

"So instead of bulldozing the sex shops and brothels, Linden decided to relocate them to their own dedicated island. Now Big Blue and the blue-movie theatres can both comfortably entertain their clients, and never the twain shall meet.

"Other vices were quashed a little less amicably. In 2007, Linden caused enormous upset after shutting down casinos and other in-world gambling dens overnight, following an FBI investigation into whether the site was breaking the US ban on online gambling. People who’d invested enormous amounts of time and hard cash into developing their own casinos found they’d literally been wiped off the map, without compensation" (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/354457/whatever-happened-to-second-life/1, accessed 01-27-2010).

On January 9, 2010 Artificial intelligence engineer Douglas Hines of TrueCompanion.com introduced Roxxxy at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

" 'She doesn't vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else,' said her inventor, Douglas Hines, who unveiled Roxxxy last month at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"Lifelike dolls, artificial sex organs and sex-chat phone lines have been keeping the lonely company for decades. But Roxxxy takes virtual companionship to a new level. Powered by a computer under her soft silicone ;skin,; she employs voice-recognition and speech-synthesis software to answer questions and carry on conversations. She even comes loaded with five distinct 'personalities,' from Frigid Farrah to Wild Wendy, that can be programmed to suit customers' preferences.

" 'There's a tremendous need for this kind of product,' said Hines, a computer scientist and former Bell Labs engineer. Roxxxy won't be available for delivery for several months, but Hines is taking pre-orders through his Web site, TrueCompanion.com, where thousands of men have signed up. 'They're like, 'I can't wait to meet her,' ' Hines said. 'It's almost like the anticipation of a first date.' Women have inquired about ordering a sex robot, too. Hines says a female sex therapist even contacted him about buying one for her patients.

"Roxxxy has been like catnip to talk-show hosts since her debut at AEE, the largest porn-industry convention in the country. In a recent monologue, Jay Leno expressed amazement that a sex robot could carry on lifelike conversations and express realistic emotions. 'Luckily, guys,' he joked, 'there's a button that turns that off.' Curious conventioneers packed Hines' AEE booth last month in Las Vegas, asking questions and stroking Roxxxy's skin as she sat on a couch in a black negligee.

" 'Roxxxy generated a lot of buzz at AEE,' said Grace Lee, spokeswoman for the porn-industry convention. 'The prevailing sentiment of everyone I talked to about Roxxxy is 'version 1.0,' but people were fascinated by the concept, and it caused them to rethink the possibilities of 'sex toys.' '

"Hines, a self-professed happily married man from Lincoln Park, New Jersey, says he spent more than three years developing the robot after trying to find a marketable application for his artificial-intelligence technology. Roxxxy's body is made from hypoallergenic silicone -- the kind of stuff in prosthetic limbs -- molded over a rigid skeleton. She cannot move on her own but can be contorted into almost any natural position. To create her shape, a female model spent a week posing for a series of molds. The robot runs on a self-contained battery that lasts about three hours on one charge, Hines says. Customers can recharge Roxxxy with an electrical cord that plugs into her back.

"A motor in her chest pumps heated air through a tube that winds through the robot's body, which Hines says keeps her warm to the touch. Roxxxy also has sensors in her hands and genital areas -- yes, she is anatomically correct -- that will trigger vocal responses from her when touched. She even shudders to simulate orgasm. When someone speaks to Roxxxy, her computer converts the words to text and then uses pattern-recognition software to match them against a database containing hundreds of appropriate responses. The robot then answers aloud -- her prerecorded "voice" is supplied by an unnamed radio host -- through a loudspeaker hidden under her wig.

" 'Everything you say to her is processed. It's very near real time, almost without delay,' Hines said of the dynamics of human-Roxxxy conversation. 'To make it as realistic as possible, she has different dialogue at different times. She talks in her sleep. She even snores.' (The snoring feature can be turned off, he says.) Roxxxy understands and speaks only English for now, but Hines' True Companion company is developing Japanese and Spanish versions. For an extra fee, he'll also record customizable dialogue and phrases for each client, which means Roxxxy could talk to you about NASCAR, say, or the intricacies of politics in the Middle East" (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/01/sex.robot/, accessed 02-06-2010).

Microsoft introduced Kinect, a natural user interface providing full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition, for the Xbox 360 video game platform. The device featured an "RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software."  It enabled users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller.

"The system tracks 48 parts of your body in three-dimensional space. It doesn’t just know where your hand is, like the Wii. No, the Kinect tracks the motion of your head, hands, torso, waist, knees, feet and so on" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/technology/personaltech/04pogue.html?scp=1&sq=kinect&st=cse, accessed 11-04-2010).

IBM's Watson question answering system supercomputer, developed at IBM's T J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, running DeepQA software, defeated the two best human Jeopardy! players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson's hardware consisted of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers. Each server utilized a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core. The system operatesd with 16 terabytes of RAM.

The success of the machine underlines very significant advances in deep analytics and the ability of a machine to process unstructured data, and especially to intepret and speak natural language.

"Watson is an effort by I.B.M. researchers to advance a set of techniques used to process human language. It provides striking evidence that computing systems will no longer be limited to responding to simple commands. Machines will increasingly be able to pick apart jargon, nuance and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the ambiguity of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the “Paris Hilton problem” — the ability, for example, to determine whether a query is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or simply to pass time surfing the Internet.  

"If, as many predict, Watson defeats its human opponents on Wednesday, much will be made of the philosophical consequences of the machine’s achievement. Moreover, the I.B.M. demonstration also foretells profound sociological and economic changes.  

"Traditionally, economists have argued that while new forms of automation may displace jobs in the short run, over longer periods of time economic growth and job creation have continued to outpace any job-killing technologies. For example, over the past century and a half the shift from being a largely agrarian society to one in which less than 1 percent of the United States labor force is in agriculture is frequently cited as evidence of the economy’s ability to reinvent itself.  

"That, however, was before machines began to 'understand' human language. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to lead to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.  

" 'As designers of tools and products and technologies we should think more about these issues,' said Pattie Maes, a computer scientist at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Not only do designers face ethical issues, she argues, but increasingly as skills that were once exclusively human are simulated by machines, their designers are faced with the challenge of rethinking what it means to be human.  

"I.B.M.’s executives have said they intend to commercialize Watson to provide a new class of question-answering systems in business, education and medicine. The repercussions of such technology are unknown, but it is possible, for example, to envision systems that replace not only human experts, but hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs throughout the economy and around the globe. Virtually any job that now involves answering questions and conducting commercial transactions by telephone will soon be at risk. It is only necessary to consider how quickly A.T.M.’s displaced human bank tellers to have an idea of what could happen" (John Markoff,"A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans," http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15essay.html?hp, accessed 02-17-2011).

♦ As a result of this technological triumph, IBM took the unusal step of building a colorful website concerning all aspects of Watson, including numerous embedded videos.

♦ A few of many articles on the match published during or immediately after it included:

John Markoff, "Computer Wins on 'Jeopardy!': Trivial, It's Not," http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html?hpw

Samara Lynn, "Dissecting IBM Watson's Jeopardy! Game," PC Magazine. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380351,00.asp

John C. Dvorak, "Watson is Creaming the Humans. I Cry Foul," PC Magazine. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380451,00.asp

Henry Lieberman published a three-part article in MIT Technology Review, "A Worthwhile Contest for Artificial Intelligence" http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/26391/?nlid=4132

♦ An article which discussed the weaknesses of Watson versus a human in Jeopardy! was Greg Lindsay, "How I Beat IBM's Watson at Jeopardy! (3 Times)" http://www.fastcompany.com/1726969/how-i-beat-ibms-watson-at-jeopardy-3-times

♦ An opinion column emphasizing the limitations of Watson compared to the human brain was Stanley Fish, "What Did Watson the Computer Do?" http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/what-did-watson-the-computer-do/

♦ A critical response to Stanley Fish's column by Sean Dorrance Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Computers Can't Do, was published in The New York Times at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/watson-still-cant-think/?nl=opinion&emc=tya1

Texting in Unusual Contexts:  For more than two weeks in November 2011 climber Tommy Caldwell lived on a nylon ledge hung 1,200 feet up El Capitan, the massive sweep of granite standing sentinel over Yosemite Valley. 

"One of the world’s best all-around rock climbers, he slept on the ledge, cooked on the ledge and went to the bathroom into a receptacle hanging below the ledge. And at the top of this solitary, silent sport, he was being watched by thousands of spectators around the world. . . .

"Caldwell updated his progress on Facebook using his iPhone, which he charged with portable solar panels on the wall. His fans, more than 4,000 of whom he accumulated during his climb, could follow along in real time with commentary from the climber himself. No need to wait days, weeks or months for a print article or video. The Dawn Wall, as Caldwell’s project is known, is the latest example of what has become an increasingly accepted practice among professional climbers and the wider climbing community: from-the-route social media. Observers enjoy it, sponsors encourage it and climbers get to share what is inherently a selfish pursuit" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/sports/as-climbers-go-text-it-on-the-mountain-reaction-is-divided.html?hp).

On January 17, 2013 the Philadelphia Tribune announced that Zora Ball, a seven year old first grader at the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in Philadelphia, was the youngest person ever to create a full version of a mobile game app. Zora created the app using the Bootstrap programming language. She unveiled the app at the University of Pennsylvania’s “Bootstrap Expo.”