GPU - space travel - alphazero

shuiming.....it reminds me ken thompson: technology advancement is initiated in games.

cc.....That pattern runs through Thompson's own career, though I don't know of an exact quote from him saying it:

Unix began with a game

In 1969 Thompson wrote Space Travel, a game simulating the solar system, on a large GE mainframe. Running it cost about $75 per session in machine time.

To play it cheaply, he moved it to an unused PDP-7 in a corner at Bell Labs. There was no operating system there, so he had to write everything himself: floating-point routines, graphics, a debugger.

Those tools, plus a file system he'd been designing, grew into Unix. The system behind Linux, macOS, iPhone and Android has its roots in a game.

Chess: Belle

With Joe Condon, Thompson built Belle, a special-purpose chess machine. In 1980 it became world computer chess champion and the first machine to reach master level. He also computed endgame tablebases: perfect play for every position with few pieces. They showed some endgames humans thought were draws were actually wins, sometimes needing over 100 precise moves. That's the same lesson as AlphaZero, 35 years earlier: exhaustive computation exceeded centuries of human theory.

Why games drive progress

Clear goals and instant feedback: you know immediately whether something works. Bounded worlds: small enough to build, rich enough to be hard. Intrinsic motivation: people work on games for fun, without needing permission or funding. Thompson didn't ask Bell Labs to build an OS; he wanted to play Space Travel. They push hardware. Gaming demand built the GPU industry, and GPUs are what made deep learning, and AlphaGo, possible.

So there's a line from Space Travel on a PDP-7, through Belle and chess, to GPUs built for video games, to AlphaGo Zero. Each step used a game as a clean testing ground for an idea that later went far beyond games.