AI in the 80s? How a Simple Animal Guessing Game Pioneered Machine Learning
11 comments
·January 8, 2025082349872349872
let's not forget the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...
tdeck
I read about this idea and actually built a variant in college for the Washington University ACM (our CS student club). We ran a demonstration at one of the engineering school events and ended up refilling the matchboxes multiple times that day - it was a hit!
If I recall, there is a way to significantly reduce the number of matchboxes needed by taking advantage of mirrored board conditions. Somewhere I have a Perl script that generated HTML for all the matchbox covers and possible next states.
CamperBob2
That's immensely more interesting than a program that plays 20 Questions. I'm amazed I've never heard of it!
mysterydip
chapter 8 of this book goes into detail and how to run your own. fascinating stuff! https://ia904503.us.archive.org/13/items/gardner006/gardner0...
onionisafruit
This program was one of my first interactions with a pc. This was a wonderful shot of nostalgia.
kazinator
Guilty. I worked with a version of this program.
anoncow
I am surprised that the program understood English grammar.
tzs
I've occasionally thought about trying to organize a filesystem that way.
egypturnash
Opening image: AI-generated picture of a slightly melting computer, with keys that can only type words like "kgonfutz" or "oøoøøo".
I can only assume the rest of the article is also AI-generated, with a similar attention to detail. Tab closed without reading.
rhet0rica
Well, dear Peggy, the program in question is, in fact, known to have existed in 1974 on Multics (https://multicians.org/terminals.html), so you're not half wrong.
The other major issue is that it isn't machine learning—it's a classic example of an expert system, even if there is a bit of a gray area around whether a binary decision tree qualifies as ML.
The worst part, of course, is that it takes less time to slap "GUESS THE ANIMAL" on a stock image of a glass terminal than it does to prompt a diffusion model to generate the same thing with passable fidelity... and it still wouldn't be an accurate depiction of what the program actually did.
This looks like "Pervading Animal" (or just "Animal") from the 1970's [1]. Said to be the first computer worm.
[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/animal.html