Computed·Blg

Via Forbes

by Roger Kay

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IBM researchers reverse engineered a macaque brain as a start to engineering one of their own

The gnomes at IBM’s research labs were not content to make merely a genius computer that could beat any human at the game of jeopardy.  They had to go and create a new kind of machine intelligence that mimics the actual human brain.

Watson, the reigning jeopardy champ, is smart, but it’s still recognizably a computer.  This new stuff is something completely different.  IBM is setting out to build an electronic brain from the ground up.

Cognitive computing, as the new field is called, takes computing concepts to a whole new level.  Earlier this week, Dharmendra Modha, who works at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, regaled a roomful of analysts with what cognitive computing can do and how IBM is going about making a machine that thinks the way we do.  His own blog on the subject is here.

First Modha described the challenges, which involve aspects of neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology.

The human brain integrates memory and processing together, weighs less than 3 lbs, occupies about a two-liter volume, and uses less power than a light bulb.  It operates as a massively parallel distributed processor.  It is event driven, that is, it reacts to things in its environment, uses little power when active and even less while resting.  It is a reconfigurable, fault-tolerant learning system.  It is excellent at pattern recognition and teasing out relationships.

A computer, on the other hand, has separate memory and processing.  It does its work sequentially for the most part and is run by a clock.  The clock, like a drum majorette in a military band, drives every instruction and piece of data to its next location — musical chairs with enough chairs.  As clock rates increase to drive data faster, power consumption goes up dramatically, and even at rest these machines need a lot of electricity.  More importantly, computers have to be programmed.  They are hard wired and fault prone.  They are good at executing defined algorithms and performing analytics.

With $41 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the scientists at the Almaden lab set out to make a brain in a project called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE).

The rough analogy between a brain and a computer posits roles for cell types — neurons, axons, and synapses — that correspond to machine elements — processors, communications links, and memory.  The matches are not exact, as brain cells’ functions are less distinct from each other than the computer elements.  But the key is that the brain elements all reside near each other, and activity in any given complex is stimulated by activity from adjacent complexes.  That is, thoughts stimulate other thoughts.

Modha and his team set out to map and synthesize a wiring diagram for the brain, no trivial task, as the brain has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses.  In May 2009, the team managed to simulate a system with 1 billion neurons, roughly the brain of a lower mammal.  Except that it operates at one-thousandth of real time, not enough to perform what Modha called “the four Fs”: food, fight, flight, and mating.

But the structure of this machine is entirely different from today’s commercial computers.  The memory and processing elements are built close together.  It has no clock.  Operations are asynchronous and event driven; that is, they have no predetermined order or schedule.  And instead of being programmed, they learn.  Just like us.

Part of getting the power down to brain-like levels is not storing temporary results (caching, in industry jargon).  Sensing stimulates action, which is sensed and acted upon further.  And so on.

The team recently built a smaller hardware version of the brain simulation, one with just 256  neurons, 262,000 programmable synapses, and 65,000 learning synapses.  The good news is that this machine runs at within an order of magnitude of the power that a real brain consumes.  With its primitive capabilities, this brainlette is capable of spatial navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, and associative memory and can do evidence-based hypothesis generation.  It has a “mind’s eye” that can see a pattern, for example, a badly written number, and generate a good guess as to what the actual number is.  Already better than our Precambrian ancestors.

Modha pointed out that this type of reasoning is a lot like that of a typical right hemisphere in the brain: intuitive, parallel, synthetic.  Not content with half a brain, Modha envisions adding a typical von Neumann-type computer, which acts more like a reasoning left hemisphere, to the mix, and having the two share information, just like a real brain.

When this brain is ready to go to market, I’m going to send my own on holiday and let Modha’s do my thinking for me.

Oh, and, by the way, in case you were wondering whether the SyNAPSE project has caused Watson to be put out to pasture, nothing could be further from the truth.  Watson is alive and well and moving on to new, more practical applications.

For example, since jeopardy contestants can’t “call a friend,” Watson was constrained to the data that could be loaded directly into the machine (no Internet searches), but in the latest application of Watson technology — medical diagnoses — the Internet is easily added to the corpus within the machine, allowing Watson to search a much wider range of unstructured data before rendering an answer.

Watson had to hit the bell faster than the human contestants, but the doctors seeking advice on a strange set of symptoms can easily wait a half hour or longer.  So, Watson can make more considered choices.  Watson at work is a serious tool.

All this genius is causing my brain to explode.

Disclosure: Endpoint has a consulting relationship with IBM.

Via PCWorld

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Hackers reportedly plan to fight back against Internet censorship by putting their own communications satellites into orbit and developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with them.

The news comes as the tech world is up in arms about proposed legislation that many feel would threaten online freedom.

According to BBC News, the satellite plan was recently outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It's being called the "Hackerspace Global Grid."

If you don't like the idea of hackers being able to communicate better, hacker activist Nick Farr said knowledge is the only motive of the project, which also includes the development of new electronics that can survive in space, and launch vehicles that can get them there.

Farr and his cohorts are working on the project along with Constellation, a German aerospace research initiative that involves interlinked student projects.

You might think it would be hard for just anybody to put a satellite into space, but hobbyists and amateurs have been able in recent years to use balloons to get them up there. However, without the deep pockets of national agencies or large companies they have a hard time tracking the devices.

To better locate their satellites, the German hacker group came up with the idea of a sort of reverse GPS that uses a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.

Supposedly, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time while improving the transmission of data from the satellites to Earth.

The plan isn't without limitations.

For one thing, low orbit satellites don't stay in a single place. And any country could go to the trouble of disabling them. At the same time, outer space isn’t actually governed by the countries over which it floats.

The scheme discussed by hackers follows the introduction of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, which many believe to be a threat to online freedom.

As PC World's Tony Bradley put it, the bill is a combination of an overzealous drive to fight Internet piracy, with elected representatives who don't know the difference between DNS, IM, and MP3. In short, SOPA is a "draconian legislation that far exceeds its intended scope, and threatens the Constitutional rights of law abiding citizens," he wrote.

And apparently those who typically don't follow the law -- hackers -- think there's something they can do about it.

Via Businessweek

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The tech-nerd legion bent on saving humanity from asteroids, contagions, and robot revolutions

Illustration by Asaf Hanuka

Rick Schwall retired seven years ago after a successful career in Silicon Valley. He says he’s a millionaire but declines to reveal where he worked or how he made his money. “I consider all of that stuff to be absolutely pointless,” he says. “What is important is that in 2006 I stumbled upon existential risk.”

For the uninitiated, existential risk is a broad term covering catastrophic events that could wipe out the human species. Some existential risk devotees agonize over nuclear wars, climate change, and virus outbreaks. Others, such as Schwall, put more energy into worrying about the potential downside of information technology. They fret about a super-powerful artificial intelligence run amok and hordes of killer nanobots. “There are a number of people who have knowledge in this field that estimate humanity’s chance at making it through this century at about 50 percent,” Schwall says. “Even if that number is way off and it’s one in a billion, that’s too high for me.”

In August, Schwall started an organization called Saving Humanity from Homo Sapiens. The nonprofit, which boasts an eye-catching logo of a man holding a gun to his throat, looks to fund researchers who have plans for taming artificial intelligence and developing safeguards that protect man from machines. So far, Schwall has doled out a few thousand dollars to a handful of researchers, but it’s early days for SHFHS. Schwall, after all, is thinking big and answering the grandest of callings. “There are so many people who cannot wrap their minds around all of humanity,” he says. “I don’t know why I rose above that. I have no clue.”

Religious groups have long dominated talk of the apocalypse. Most often the world ends at the hands of a god who transfers people to a better place. These days, though, you’ll find plenty of atheistic types in Silicon Valley meditating on man’s potential for self-inflicted destruction, and it doesn’t often lead much of anywhere. These people design the most sophisticated technology on the planet but bemoan its dark potential. They’re adherents of the Singularity, a sort of nerd rapture that will occur when machines become smarter than people and begin advancing technological change on their own, eventually outpacing and—in a worst-case scenario—enslaving people before getting bored and grinding us up into fleshy pulp. This, as it happens, resembles the prospect that had the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, all worked up.

One of the gripes emanating from the existential risk adherents is that people have not taken these warnings seriously enough. Sure, governments, research organizations, and philanthropists fund work to curb global warming, contain nuclear weapons arsenals, and prevent viral outbreaks. But where’s the money for a much needed artificial intelligence force field or an asteroid blocker? With some people predicting the Singularity’s arrival as early as the next decade, the race is on for man to defend himself from his own creations.

To properly address such threats before it’s too late, a booming subculture of tech-minded thinkers, entrepreneurs, and nongovernmental organizations has stepped into the existential risk realm. Many of the groups, like SHFHS, focus on worries about artificial intelligence (AI). Others have secured some serious cash to fund a broader set of projects to protect us from annihilation in whatever form it might take.

Consider, for example, the Lifeboat Foundation. It’s an organization run out of the Minden (Nev.) home of Eric Klien, a technologist who has dabbled in the fields of cryonics and online dating. This group frets about science fiction scenarios such as computers gone bad, alien attacks, and the arrival of nasty man-made synthetic creatures. To date, the Lifeboat Foundation has raised more than $500,000 from corporations such as Google (GOOG), Oracle (ORCL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Fannie Mae (FNMA) and from hundreds of individuals. Asked to comment, a spokesman for Fannie Mae was surprised to learn of the donations, which were part of an employer match program.

The Lifeboat Foundation’s flashiest project is the A-Prize, a contest to create an artificial life form “with an emphasis on the safety of the researchers, public, and environment.” Thus far, donors have pledged $29,000 to the winner. The real down-and-dirty work, however, revolves around shields, with projects under way to build Asteroid, Brain, Alien, Internet, Black Hole, and Antimatter shields. Other work includes the creation of space habitats and personality preservers.

It’s unclear how far along any of these projects is. Most of the Lifeboat Foundation’s money seems to go toward supporting conferences and publishing papers. But laying down the rigorous theoretical groundwork for such projects ensures their viability when the existential hammer falls. Lifeboat remains one of the only places where people think about the panoply of nontraditional risks to mankind.

Klien would like to see some bigger donors step up and allow the Lifeboat Foundation to tackle truly massive endeavors. Part of the problem is that people have not gotten a real taste for a near-death experience that awakens their existential risk spirit. “There will be a 9/11 with dirty bombs or nuclear bombs,” he says. “It will make it a lot easier for us at that point.”

The major success story of the existential risk movement is the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which focuses on making sure we end up with “friendly” AI. Every year it holds an event called the Singularity Summit where some speakers dazzle the crowd with cutting-edge technology, while others reinforce the existential risk cause.

The Singularity Institute prides itself on examining existential risk with a rational eye. One of its thought leaders and board members is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prolific blogger who spends a great deal of time laying out the logical reasons people should be concerned about existential risk and developing a mathematical framework for friendly AI. Yudkowsky has a knack for walking people through the logical constraints that a computer scientist might want to consider when building an artificial intelligence to help make sure it doesn’t light up and take over the world. “He is a good candidate for being the most important person on the planet,” Schwall says of Yudkowsky. Backers of the Singularity Institute and this type of work include Peter Thiel, the first investor in Facebook, Jaan Tallinn, one of the programmers who helped build Skype Technologies, and companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), Motorola (MSI), and Fidelity Investments.

Tallinn attended this year’s summit and delivered an impassioned speech about the need to direct more money toward the prevention of existential risk. Estimates bandied about at the conference placed worldwide spending on existential risk at about $59 million per year. With this in mind, Tallinn made a $100,000 donation to the Singularity Institute on the spot and then called on other philanthropists to stop thinking about boosting their “social status” by donating to the usual do-gooder causes. Instead, the rich should support longer-term efforts. “Future societies will look back on us and feel depressed because of the actions we did not do,” he said.

This kind of talk isn’t limited to technophiles suffering from midlife crises; there is, in fact, a youthful existential risk contingent, too. Thomas Eliot, 23, bounded around the Singularity Summit in a uniform consisting of red Converse All-Stars, jeans, a bow tie, and rosy, fresh-faced cheeks. Eliot, who had just obtained a math degree from Willamette University, plans to spend the next year or two living off his savings while he studies machine learning and AI. He’s also been tapped by Schwall as the executive director of SHFSH. “An unfriendly artificial intelligence could cause a negative Singularity and turn the entire planet into paper clips,” Eliot warns. “Even if the chances of something like this happening are low, it would be the worst thing ever.”

Via Technology Review

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Infamous for failing to commercialize the technologies it invented, Xerox's R&D subsidiary has a new strategy for innovation: make money.

Cheap trick: In a prototype, logic circuits and computer memory are printed together on a sheet of plastic.
PARC

Last month, a small Norwegian company called Thinfilm Electronics and PARC, the storied Silicon Valley research lab, jointly showed off a technological first—a plastic film that combined both printed transistors and printed digital memory.

Such flexible electronics could be an important component of future products, such as food packaging that senses and record temperatures, shock-sensing helmets, as well as smart toys. But the story of how PARC's technology—the printed transistors—wound up paired with memory technology from an obscure Norwegian company also provides a window onto a 10-year struggle by Xerox to transform the way it commercializes R&D ideas.

For most of its 40-year history, PARC (for Palo Alto Research Center) was as famous for squandering new technologies as it was for inventing them. The mouse, the graphical user interface, and the drop-down menu were all born at PARC—but it was Apple and Microsoft that commercialized them and made them cornerstone inventions of the PC industry.

The list of innovations lost hardly stops there. While Xerox did, of course, commercialize PARC's blockbuster technology of laser printing, other PARC inventions ultimately commercialized elsewhere include Ethernet networking, the PDF file format, and electronic paper—created at the research lab in 1975, long before the Amazon Kindle and other e-books appeared.

By 2001, Xerox had seen enough. Facing poor financial results, its then-CEO, Anne M. Mulcahy, vowed to return the company to profitability. As part of that effort, Xerox reincorporated its cash-burning R&D center as an independent company, simply called PARC, with a mandate to turn a profit whether by licensing patents, through contract research, or by creating partnerships with other firms.

The buzzword attached to new era was "open innovation"; PARC's researchers would now freely associate with the outside world to hone ideas and work out how to commercialize them. "When PARC spun out in 2002, open, collaborative innovation became, in essence, the business model for PARC," says Lawrence Lee, currently PARC's director of strategy. "But we've only figured out what that means in practice over the last couple of years."

PARC's advances in printing transistors came at around the same time the lab was being reorganized, making the technology a key proving ground for the new strategy. PARC at first hoped to develop organic electronic displays, a potentially huge market, but the technology proved difficult to manufacture, and it fell far short of silicon-based displays in performance.

In the old days, the idea might have languished. Xerox headquarters had often failed to embrace new inventions that didn't relate to the company's core businesses of selling copiers. But following the "open innovation" idea, PARC started shopping the technology to manufacturers, telling them that printed transistors could also provide very cheap, flexible sensors and computer logic for packaging, toys, and other uses.

Tamara St. Claire, PARC's vice president for global business development, says manufacturers liked the idea but wanted to see what she terms a "minimum viable product"—management-speak for something more than a benchtop experiment. To develop one, in 2010 PARC formed a "co-innovation engagement" with Thinfilm, which was already making printed memory. The resulting prototype circuit was the first to combine both printed transistors and memory, according to PARC.

The Xerox company now has partnerships with several other firms and government agencies to use printed electronics in pressure-measuring helmets as well as in packaging that can sense pressure, sound, light, acceleration, or temperature. By doing so, it hopes to tap a market for printed electronics that an analyst firm, IDTechex, estimates could reach $45 billion by 2021.

For PARC, the partnerships are signs that open innovation is working. "There are plenty of great ideas at PARC, but you learn early on that execution is often the hard part—execution and timing," says St. Claire. "It's something you can say PARC is really starting to understand. You almost have to be as innovative in the commercialization—especially when you have game-changing technologies—as on the technology side."

PARC, which once served only Xerox, now has an expanding list of technologies in development with outside partners that include Fujitsu, Motorola, NEC Display Solutions, Microsoft, Samsung, SolFocus, and Oracle. The change in strategy has helped turn it from a multimillion-dollar financial sinkhole into a modest, but growing, innovation business. In 2010, it was profitable on revenue of more than $60 million, a spokesman says. PARC, which has 250 employees, is also patenting at a fast clip, with about 150 patents filed per year since 2002.

The focus on doing business, not just having ideas, has also boosted morale, says Teresa Amabile, an organizational psychologist at Harvard Business School. "I've talked to a lot of scientists, technicians, and engineers doing R&D inside companies ... and the people I talk to at PARC [are] more strongly, intrinsically motivated than the average," she says. "They are driven by real passions and excitement for the disruptive discoveries they are making, coupled with excitement for seeing what they were doing actually being used in the world. That combination is pretty unusual."

Via TomsGuide

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Microsoft announced that it will be launching silent updates for IE9 in January.

Despite the controversy of user control, Microsoft especially has a reason to make this move to react to browser "update fatigue" that has resulted in virtually "stale" IE users who won't upgrade their browsers unless they upgrade their operating system as well.

The most recent upgrade of Google's Chrome browser shows just how well the silent update feature works. Within five days of introduction, Chrome 15 market share fell from 24.06 percent to just 6.38 percent, while the share of Chrome 16 climbed from 0.35 percent to 19.81 percent, according to StatCounter. Within five days, Google moved about 75 percent of its user base - more than 150 million users - from one browser to another. Within three days, Chrome 16 market share surpassed the market share of IE9 (currently at about 10.52 percent for this month), in four days it surpassed Firefox 8 (currently at about 15.60 percent) and will be passing IE8 today, StatCounter data indicates.

What makes this data so important is the fact that Google is dominating HTML5 capability across all operating system platforms and not just Windows 7, where IE9 has a slight advantage, according to Microsoft (StatCounter does not break out data for browser share on individual operating systems). IE9 was introduced on March 14 of 2011, has captured only 10.52 percent market share and has followed a similar slow upgrade pattern as its predecessors. For example, IE, which was introduced in March 2009, reached its market share peak in the month IE9 was introduced - at 30.24 percent. Since then, the browser has declined to only 22.17 percent and 57.52 percent of the IE user base still uses IE8 today.

With the silent updates becoming available for IE8 and IE9, Microsoft is likely to avoid another IE6 disaster with IE8. Even more important for Microsoft is that those users who update to IE9 may be less likely to switch to Chrome.

Via ZDNet

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owncloud.com

Everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox. But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control. That’s where ownCloud comes in.

OwnCloud is an open-source cloud program. You use it to set up your own cloud server for file-sharing, music-streaming, and calendar, contact, and bookmark sharing project. As a server program it’s not that easy to set up. OpenSUSE, with its Mirall installation program and desktop client makes it easier to set up your own personal ownCloud, but it’s still not a simple operation. That’s going to change.

According to ownCloud’s business crew, “OwnCloud offers the ease-of-use and cost effectiveness of Dropbox and box.net with a more secure, better managed offering that, because it’s open source, offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in. This makes it perfect for business use. OwnCloud users can run file sync and share services on their own hardware and storage or use popular public hosting and storage offerings.” I’ve tried it myself and while setting it up is still mildly painful, once up ownCloud works well.

OwnCloud enables universal access to files through a Web browser or WebDAV. It also provides a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across all devices and enables basic editing right on the Web. Programmers will be able to add features to it via its open application programming interface (API).

OwnCloud is going to become an easy to run and use personal, private cloud thanks to a new commercial company that’s going to take ownCloud from interesting open-source project to end-user friendly program. This new company will be headed by former SUSE/Novell executive Markus Rex. Rex, who I’ve known for years and is both a business and technology wizard, will serve as both CEO and CTO. Frank Karlitschek, founder of the ownCloud project, will be staying.

To make this happen, this popular–350,000 users-program’s commercial side is being funded by Boston-based General Catalyst, a high-tech. venture capital firm. In the past, General Catalyst has helped fund such companies as online travel company Kayak and online video platform leader Brightcove.

General Catalyst came on board, said John Simon, Managing Director at General Catalyst in a statement, because, “With the explosion of unstructured data in the enterprise and increasingly mobile (and insecure) ways to access it, many companies have been forced to lock down their data–sometimes forcing employees to find less than secure means of access, or, if security is too restrictive, risk having all that unavailable When we saw the ease-of-use, security and flexibility of ownCloud, we were sold.”

“In a cloud-oriented world, ownCloud is the only tool based on a ubiquitous open-source platform,” said Rex, in a statement. “This differentiator enables businesses complete, transparent, compliant control over their data and data storage costs, while also allowing employees simple and easy data access from anywhere.”

As a Linux geek, I already liked ownCloud. At the company releases mass-market ownCloud products and service in 2012, I think many of you are going to like it as well. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this program goes from here.

Via Wired

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The lottery of who you sit next to on an airline flight can make travel interesting, or unbearable. Recognizing that the experience of its passengers can be greatly influenced by the people sitting next to them, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is introducing ‘Meet & Seat.’ The service will allow passengers to choose who they sit next to based on their social media profiles.

The service will be available to everybody and both passengers must choose to take part in the service in order to pick your fellow passenger. Those who enjoy simply  putting on their headphones and enjoying a movie on their laptop – alone – can just avoid the experiment altogether according to the International Business Times.

The newspaper naturally discusses the match making potential of KLM’s service. According to the IBT, a recent poll showed a third of passengers surveyed said they later met with a fellow passenger after a flight.

Everybody’s favorite news analysis animators over at Next Media Animation in Taiwan were a bit more blunt. Their description of how KLM’s new service might work doesn’t include waiting for the airplane to land.

Via Dig Info TV

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This concept model for a next-generation vending machine, which features a see through display, is being developed by Sanden, a large manufacturer of vending machines, in conjunction with Okaya Electronics and Intel.

This concept model has a vertical, 65-inch, Full HD transparent display. The products behind the display can be seen through the glass, and you can simultaneously see high definition text, pictures, and Flash animations on the display.

"This vending machine uses the Intel SandyBridge Core. It features Audience Impression Metric, or AIM, and can do anonymous face recognition. So this machine can recognize whether customers are male or female, or old or young."

When there aren't any customers, the machine shows a large digital clock and animations, to attract the attention of people passing by. If a customer stands in front of the machine, it estimates their attributes from anonymous video analysis, and shows advertising content to match the customers demographic.

"In this demo, we're suggesting that vending machines could be used to purchase luxury items, such as cosmetics and wine. The machine also has a public safety mode in times of emergency, which shows information such as evacuation routes."

"I think this machine could be used in lots of ways, depending on customers' imagination. It has a great many possibilities, so we'd like to get ideas from everyone, rather than just using it as a regular vending machine."

Via Technologizer

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How a little-known 1971 machine launched an industry.

Forty years ago, Nutting Associates released the world’s first mass-produced and commercially sold video game, Computer Space. It was the brainchild of Nolan Bushnell, a charismatic engineer with a creative vision matched only by his skill at self-promotion. With the help of his business partner Ted Dabney and the staff of Nutting Associates, Bushnell pushed the game from nothing into reality only two short years after conceiving the idea.

Computer Space pitted a player-controlled rocket ship against two machine-controlled flying saucers in a space simulation set before a two-dimensional star field. The player controlled the rocket with four buttons: one for fire, which shoots a missile from the front of the rocket ship; two directional rotation buttons (to rotate the ship orientation clockwise or counterclockwise); and one for thrust, which propelled the ship in whichever direction it happened to be pointing. Think of Asteroids without the asteroids, and you should get the picture.

During play, two saucers would appear on the screen and shoot at the player while flying in a zig-zag formation. The player’s goal was to dodge the saucer fire and shoot the saucers.

Considering a game of this complexity playing out on a TV set, you might think that it was created as a sophisticated piece of software running on a computer. You’d think it, but you’d be wrong–and Bushnell wouldn’t blame you for the mistake. How he and Dabney managed to pull it off is a story of audacity, tenacity, and sheer force-of-will worthy of tech legend. This is how it happened.

continue to the full story...