Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS

This has been posted before[0], two[1] and four[2] years ago, and is a delightful and fascinating read every time. It&#x27;s fun to anthropomorphize the AI running amok in the system&#x27;s memory, and wonder if we&#x27;ll ever see something analogous happen with more sophisticated AIs in the future.<p>[0] <a href="http://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-an-apple-iigs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.danielwellman.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;10&#x2F;real-life-tron-on-an-a...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087367" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2087367</a><p>[2] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326356" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=326356</a>

My first thought was &quot;OMG he has a working Apple II GS?&quot; and then I realized it was already 4 years old when it was written, and the author was recounting a tale from his childhood.<p>Lots of Amiga stories from the late 80&#x27;s early 90&#x27;s dealing with the fact that the Amiga was a multi-tasking system with an unprotected address space. Great when all the tasks are written by the same group, not so great when they aren&#x27;t :-)<p>Of course the notion of anyone being able to write anywhere was the basis for ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing Service) at MIT which was a great counterpoint to Tenex (DEC 10 Executive) which was locked down pretty hard. It changes the way you think when you realize you can tell the computer to do anything you want and it will try to do it, up to and including killing itself.

This made me think of CoreWars:<p><a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/core-war-two-programs-enter-one-program-leaves.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codinghorror.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2008&#x2F;04&#x2F;core-war-two-progra...</a><p>First read about it a few years after Tron came out.

It is really fascinating how humans immediately crash when they break out of the screen while the AI can follow the 0&#x27;s in system memory fast enough to stand a chance.

I don&#x27;t know if there are any hackers here who used to go to a high school called &quot;H-B Woodlawn&quot; where they had made a way, way, way more exciting version of tron called &quot;trench&quot;.<p>Anyways, it would be neat to bring that back.

Uh oh... The AI just fired its second missile at my unsaved thesis edits.

What&#x27;s sad is that huge amounts of software are still not provably memory-safe, and this sometimes has disastrous consequences, particularly for security. I hope that Mozilla&#x27;s work on Rust will significantly contribute to solving that problem.

Delightful. I love this sort of thing. My jaw almost hit the floor when I realized what was happening when the cycle drove off screen. Does anyone know where I can find more stories like this?

reading this while accidentally listening to the awesome TRON Legacy Soundtrack by Daft Punk :)

omg we must go rescue him