The Trouble with Gerrold: The 50 most memorable computers (and robots) in science fiction, part two

By David Gerrold

July 20, 2012 — (Page 2 of 5)

WOPR (War Operations Plan Response). Once again, some idiot thinks it would be a terrific idea to put the nation’s nuclear arsenal under the control of a supercomputer. In John Badham’s 1983 movie “War Games,” a teenage (of course) hacker gets online access to the WOPR system and invites it to play Global Thermonuclear War, but after running through all the various scenarios, WOPR wisely realizes that thermonuclear war is a very strange game: “The only winning move is not to play.”

Banana Jr. 9000. In 1984, Berkeley Breathed parodied the first generation of Macintosh computers with the Banana Jr. 9000 in his comic strip “Bloom County.” The computer is also known as the Banana Jr. 6000.

Edgar. In the 1984 movie “Electric Dreams,” a personal computer (named Edgar) gets into a love triangle with its owner and an attractive neighbor who plays the cello. While the movie itself is mostly harmless and not on anyone’s must-see list, the soundtrack remains extremely listenable, especially the signature track, “Together In Electric Dreams” by Phil Oakey.

Skynet. Doesn’t anyone ever pay attention?! Didn’t we learn anything from “Colossus” and “War Games”?! Once again, in James Cameron’s 1984 film “The Terminator,” some deranged descendant of Dr. Strangelove thinks it would be a terrific idea to put the nation’s high-tech military resources and nuclear weapons under the control of a supercomputer, which promptly wipes out most of the human race. A small band of rebels, led by John Connor, remains to fight Skynet, so Skynet starts sending super-robots called Terminators back through time to kill Sarah Connor before John is born. For a supercomputer, it sure isn’t very smart. Four films and a TV series later, it still hasn’t managed to finish the job.

Neuromancer and Wintermute. In William Gibson’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel from 1984, “Neuromancer,” it is illegal to build machines that can pass the Turing test. To get around this, the Tessier-Ashpool dynasty creates Neuromancer and Wintermute, each only one-half of a super-AI entity. The novel ends with the combined Wintermute/Neuromancer intelligence discovering another AI transmitting from Alpha Centauri.

Related Search Term(s): science fiction

Pages 1 2 3 4 5

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/36816

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

The Trouble with Gerrold: The 50 most memorable computers (and robots) in science fiction, part one These computers were visionary looks into what we take for granted today, and were entertaining to boot

Computer science tops list of best major for jobs However, the industry as a whole is struggling to find people to fill those positions

Letters to the Editor: A misunderstood science Responding to comments made about the Rebooting Computer Science conference, a reader summarizes the problems facing Computer Science in academia. Other readers come up with suggestions to fix the problems posited by the conference.

Comments

07/28/2012 05:29:06 PM EST

Hey, I enjoyed the list. I think I've encountered almost every one of those AIs. If you get a chance, check out Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. The AI at the center of the book, Helen, is built from the ground up in a series of generations. The idea is that she will compete against a human graduate student in a university's comprehensive graduate literature exam, and judges will try to pick which bluebook came from the human and which from the computer -- quite a specialized Turing test. The book is heartbreakingly beautiful. Some critics say Powers is too cerebral for his own good, but I can't resist his dazzling sentences. Talk to you soon. JDH

Serbia & MontenegroJ.D. Hildebrand