a rest day....., page-10

re: a rest day....tic tac toe. Hi Madmacs--I watched in the early hours of Sunday morning--a film--called wargames--it was made back in the early eighties--the plot was a person had created a computer similar to Hal out of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Any way the computer was prgrammed to play all sorts of games--everything from chess through to scrabble. One game it was programmed to do was play Thermonuclear War--a teenager who was a computer geek--broke into the computer finding it's password (the compuer used by Norad--in defence of the Western Hemisphere.) he decided to play Thermonuclear war--even though the puter stated "wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?" The teenager thought that they weren't playing for real--unbeknownst to him--when he started playing it, (he took the Russian side.) he inadvertently created a "Dr Strangelove"--80's version situation. The computer had been taught to learn from itself, everytime it made a mistake--it recorded the mistake and learn't from it. At the end of the film--thermonuclear war was seconds away--with both the USSR and the USA on standby alerts--with both sides ready to commit genocide against each other. The teenager felt terrible guilty about what he had inadvertently done.
In a race against time (they couldn't pull the plug out--for if they did that the puter was programmed to launch missiles straight away--with any interruption to it's power supply.) he got it to play itself tic tac toe--we all lose interest in this game--even though as young children we like it--for in the end--with the game--no one wins--if both people are playing correctly--it's impossible for either person--to get 3 000's or 3 xxx's--so the computer began to play itself--in a fratic race for time--it eventually "drew against itself"--no win situation--with 1 second to spare--it stopped the nuclear warheads from being fired. For whom the bell tolls---tic tac toe.---bell.