{"id":212,"date":"2007-03-19T22:14:34","date_gmt":"2007-03-20T06:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=212"},"modified":"2007-03-19T22:14:34","modified_gmt":"2007-03-20T06:14:34","slug":"the-nintendo-stork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=212","title":{"rendered":"The Nintendo stork"},"content":{"rendered":"

In January, the online magazine spiked<\/a> asked me to write 200 words or less on the question, “What is the greatest innovation in your field?” I thought it was a dumb question, but I answered it anyway. The magazine still hasn’t put up the responses — I guess not enough “thinkers” got back to them yet — but today, since I feel like blogging and don’t have anything else to post, here is my response. Enjoy.<\/p>\n

The greatest innovation in computer science was to represent machines<\/em> — objects that do things, respond to their environments, surprise their creators — as nothing but strings of information. When I was a kid, my overriding ambition was to write my own Nintendo games. But while I could draw the characters and the levels, I had no idea what it would be like to breathe life into a game — to teach the game how to respond to the controller. I pictured thousands of engineers in white lab coats crafting a game cartridge using enormous factory equipment, as they would a 747.<\/p>\n

Then a friend showed me a rudimentary spaceship game written in AppleBASIC. Look: here were the lines of code, and here was the game. Slowly it dawned on me that these screenfuls of funny-looking commands weren’t just some sort of blueprint for the game — they were<\/em> the game. Change the code, and the game would do something different. Better yet, the task of writing<\/em> the commands was ultimately just a big math problem. This was Alan Turing’s great insight of 1936. For me, it was a revelation comparable only to finding out where babies came from.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Unfortunately, I’ve long since lost touch with the AppleBASIC-game-playing friend — last I heard through mutual acquaintances, he went off to fight in Afghanistan, and came back injured by a shrapnel bomb.)<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In January, the online magazine spiked asked me to write 200 words or less on the question, “What is the greatest innovation in your field?” I thought it was a dumb question, but I answered it anyway. The magazine still hasn’t put up the responses — I guess not enough “thinkers” got back to them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}