Annals of OS and network history

From: Roger Ivie <IVIE_at_cc.usu.edu>
Date: Tue Mar 10 10:56:52 1998

<Didn't Danny Hillis make a computer from TinkerToys
<(TM) as part of his PhD thesis or something? I've been looking for the
<schematics....

I haven't seen schematics, but there was a write-up of a TinkerToy computer
which plays Tic Tac Toe in Scientific American a few years ago; sorry, I
don't remember the year. I do remember the description being good enough to
make me feel that I understood how the thing worked and, with a little
enthusiasm and a bunch of TinkerToys, possibly replicate. Perhaps now that
I have a big pile of K'NEX I should find the issue and give it a go.

IIRC, the Tic Tac Toe machine is essentially a ROM lookup table. You encode
the current state of the board on a part of the machine which slides up and
down then hoist that part to the top. As the part falls, it compares the
state of the board to the various entries in the ROM. Upon finding a match,
it waves a flag indicating its move.

Roger Ivie
ivie_at_cc.usu.edu
Received on Tue Mar 10 1998 - 10:56:52 GMT