Odd book

[Fred Cisin]

The Martin Gardner column about teaching matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe 
was March 1962 Scientific American, "Mathematical Games: How to build a 
game-learning machine and then teach it to play and to win"


In the novel "The Adolescence of P-1", by Thomas Joseph Ryan (1977), a 
college kid, fascinated by that article, implements an open-ended version 
on an IBM 360/30 at Waterloo [remember WATFOR?], with a goal of cracking 
additional machines through telecommunications links, and installing 
itself.
It is, of course, unrealistic fiction to think that such a system could 
be implemented on 1970s 360s.  with less than 4GB.  Besides, Windows 
security is too good for it to install itself on modern systems.

oolcay itay