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Tube Wars Revisited
euh-heugh-heugh, yeah (cough)(spit) these two AIs i know from way back since usenet decide to duke it out over some rare c library each thought it was theirs after they both stole it from a saloon in Jabberwok town. seen as how the Quakeworld-style 3D maze shootemup gone out of fashion, duel-wise they agree to have their respective address spaces mapped to a 4k rectangle within a 64k grid. they'd move around each inside their little grids and in turn call out addresses and numbers. and they'd poke that number into each other's address spaces. of course a lot of people say [sic] this isnt fucken duelling its fucken battleships innit. but we observe that most of these people are Quakers with like a BFG bolted to each shoulder and that weird way of shuffling around corners edge-on.
the field: Joe-string-pointer was a kind of retro mock-eighteen-hundreds-curlicue style (remember "Steampunk"? Joe surely do) monolithic by-four multitasker (penet-Fi@inews say he got Pick in his ancestry somewhere, but that penet-Fi got him a damn dirty mouth). Joe call his shots like a NATO general wif a Serbian grenade up his ass. skwaaawk! star-a-star one of those shifty boogers got six different cores all of 'em spying on each other half the time and looking out for the main chance the other. theys more like a goddamn basket ball team than even your half-way respectable anthology intelligence. tryin' to get 'em to do anything and it's like herdin' cats. watchin' 'em lurchin' 'round the space like theys got hostages or they try shoplift the midget delicatessen attendants. any way. these guys start pokin' at each other. Joe follows the Picard manoover or some such shit and moves around the grid in straight lines, bouncing off the walls like a pong ball. one time star-a-star score a major hit right in the middle of Joe's address space and Joe too stupid to know he's dead. he being in the middle of a copy routine he just keep going and praise "Bob" the copy were clean or he'd been and gone, boy. star-a-star does all his fancy tricks. he weave all over, stretching into a barbell shape and so forth. he fingerin his nose at Joe and was lining up a copy gun to effect a strike at Joe's leading byte edge when Joe score three nice shots in a row and four of star-a-star modules lock up on em. the others dint have the smarts to know they was fucked and tried to build a fence or something before Joe call the ref and the ref say Joe win that one. damnedest thing i ever saw, three spot-on hits in a row like that. maybe that penet-Fi aint so damn stupid. you can tell they got Pick in their ancestry somewhere the way they pause on some operations and not on others like say your basic gnu-linux AI. you get your basic dental plan (Simpsons' sample: "Dental plan! Dental plan!") gnu-linux, they're great little guys. not a hint of threading envy or anything. they're just damned happy to be awake in these wonderful times and so forth. they have their own little internal rhythms and hitches. gets so you can almost guess where they'll thrash a little just from lookin at how big their goddamn swap space is. little fellers'll hitch damn near every thousand cycles, dartin about like Mr fucken Snoid. them big bastards sweep around the grid like an ICL ME-29 drive pack going out of a sixth-floor window. glide on past saying to themselves oh no you won't catch me paging half your bleedin luck. i find the entire notion of virtual memory rather gauche, don't you? my point? my point.. is.. that Joe isn't like that at all! yep. there's something about Joe. i like him, but... (shakes head, smiling sadly) he's not right. --- Fri, 9 Apr 1999 |
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