He had never known anyone who had left a job at a big company to start a new business, as Bushnell and Dabney had left Ampex. (Memorex had spun out of Ampex in 1961, before Alcorn’s time there.) The move felt right, though, he thought-another way in which young, bright people were writing new rules for themselves in the wake of the 1960s. Bushnell and Dabney’s chutzpah impressed Alcorn almost as much as the electronic trick. Syzygy had designed Computer Space, Bushnell explained, but a small operation called Nutting Associates, which owned the office in which they were standing, was manufacturing it. Syzygy, the soon-to-be Atari, designed games for manufacturers such as the pinball giant Bally to manufacture and sell. Or, as Bushnell later chose to define it, “Atari means you are about to be engulfed.” In Bushnell and Dabney’s favorite game, Go, “Atari” means roughly the same thing as “Check” in chess. Bushnell and Dabney called their company Syzygy (a word that refers to the alignment of three celestial bodies) but soon renamed it Atari, after discovering that another company had incorporated under the name Syzygy. Then he offered Alcorn a job at $1,000 per month and 10 percent of the startup company that he and Dabney had each kicked in $350 to launch. She has been a “Prototype” columnist for the New York Times, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and a member of the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.Īlcorn had a gush of questions. Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. Had they asked him, he would have said that the thirteen-inch black-and-white General Electric model with balky wiring would be most useful for starting fires. He thought the most interesting feature of this, the first videostygame he had ever seen, was Bushnell and Dabney’s decision to use an off-the-shelf television set as a screen. The cabinet housed a shoot-em-up-in-outer-space fantasy game called Computer Space. But Alcorn paid the lovely cabinet no attention, aside from noting the vague stink of the fiberglass. He had designed it in modeling clay, and Dabney had found a swimming pool manufacturer willing to cast the design in brightly colored fiberglass. Bushnell was proud of what he called its “spacey-looking” shape. Half-built cabinets and screen with wires protruding from them sat in another.īushnell walked with Alcorn to a sinuous, six-foot-tall fiberglass cabinet with a screen at eye level. Oscilloscopes and lab benches filled one area. The space was large, about 10,000 square feet, and looked like a cross between an electronics lab and an assembly warehouse. The two men drove to an office in Mountain View, near the highway. He offered to drive Alcorn, recently hired as an associate engineer at Ampex, to see the “game on a TV screen” that Bushnell and Ted Dabney had developed at their new startup company. “It’s a company car,” he said with feigned nonchalance. Bushnell was driving a new blue station wagon. Nolan Bushnell, the tall, brash, young engineer from Alcorn’s work-study days at Ampex, had shown up at Alcorn’s Sunnyvale office. One way or another, it's never been easier to play Pong.Al Alcorn knew he was being wooed. It's part of a recent wave of AI innovation that has sparked controversy in multiple communities as creators weigh the benefits and drawbacks of the new technology. Alongside recreating iconic video games, GPT-4 is also powering platforms such as Microsoft's Bing chatbot. The company claims that the latest AI language model is "more creative and collaborative than ever before" and notes that it can accept text or image inputs from a user. Schirano also notes in a few replies that he tried to get GPT 3.5 to build Pong but was met with debugging issues, noting that GPT 4 managed to create a workable version of Pong the first time he was asked. #gpt4 /8YMUK0UQmd- Pietro Schirano March 14, 2023Īdditionally, Schirano managed to get GPT-4 to recreate playable versions of Asteroids and Breakout. I recreated the game of Pong in under 60 seconds. I don’t care that it’s not AGI, GPT-4 is an incredible and transformative technology. Schirano then shared a Replit link for those that wanted to play this build. The model suggested how he should make it before providing a basic example using JavaScript with an HTML5 Canvas API. Among them is Pietro Schirano, who tweeted out that GPT-4 created the iconic game in less than a minute, along with a screenshot of the conversation Schirano with GPT-4, asking how he could create "a pong-like game."
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