Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline · 15 Feb 2011 · 458pp · 137,960 words
tic-tac-toe. Since every game the WOPR played ended in a tie, this had the improbable effect of teaching the artificially intelligent computer that global thermonuclear war, too, was a game in which “the only winning move is not to play.” This prevented the WOPR from launching all of the United States
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro · 523pp · 154,042 words
, named Joshua, to play a war scenario. When Joshua responds, “Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?” David tells Joshua, “Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War.” David, however, is not playing a game—Joshua is a NORAD computer and controls the U.S. nuclear arsenal. By telling Joshua to arm missiles
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,” it concluded by advising “all you computer geniuses with your computers and modems and autodialers” to give up. “There’s no way you can play global thermonuclear war with NORAD, which means the rest of us can relax and enjoy the film.” Not everyone was reassured. President Ronald Reagan had seen the movie
The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman · 9 Oct 2017 · 592pp · 161,798 words
core plot of the movie WarGames, released in 1983. A teenager, David Lightman (played by Matthew Broderick), hacked into a supercomputer designed to predict outcomes of nuclear war known as War Operation Plan Response (WOPR). Lightman noted a number of familiar games but then saw one called ‘Global Thermonuclear War’ which he decided to
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019
17 War Games “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” the computer asked David Lightman. “Love to,” the teenage geek responded. “How about Global Thermonuclear War?” With two text commands, the 1983 summer blockbuster WarGames shifted into high gear. Armed with nothing but an IMSAI computer and a modem in his bedroom, a kid in suburban
Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann · 17 Jun 2019
WarGames, World War III seems imminent. An artificial intelligence (known as Joshua) has been put in charge of the U.S. nuclear launch control system. Thinking he has hacked into his favorite game manufacturer, a teenage hacker (played by Matthew Broderick) unwittingly asks Joshua to play a “game” against him called Global Thermonuclear War
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any strategy ends in a tie. After learning the futility of playing tic-tac-toe, Joshua proceeds to simulate all the possible strategies for the Global Thermonuclear War game and comes to the same conclusion. He says (in a computer voice): A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How
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about a nice game of chess? The reason that there is no winner in Global Thermonuclear War is that both sides have amassed enough weapons to destroy the other side and so any nuclear conflict would quickly escalate to mutually assured destruction
Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock · 17 Jun 2019 · 236pp · 62,158 words
red characters. The similarities between these simulations and later videogames was riffed on in the 1983 film WarGames, in which Matthew Broderick’s character hacks into a military supercomputer. On finding a simulation called “Global Thermonuclear War” installed on the system, he believes it is a game and begins to play as the Soviet
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
by Nick Bostrom · 3 Jun 2014 · 574pp · 164,509 words
least one scenario has been widely recognized in which the existing world order would come to an end in the course of minutes or hours: global thermonuclear war. 3. This would be consistent with the observation that the Flynn effect—the secular increase in measured IQ scores within most populations at a rate
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, wars, and catastrophic upheavals during those millennia that would probably inconvenience biological humans on the outside. Even a 0.01% risk per year of a global thermonuclear war or similar cataclysm would entail a near certain loss for the biological humans living out their lives in slowmo sidereal time. To overcome this problem
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker · 24 Sep 2012 · 1,351pp · 385,579 words
they’re wrong. This isn’t the first time we’ve been warned of certain ruin. The experts have predicted civilization-ending aerial gas attacks, global thermonuclear war, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a Chinese razing of half of humanity, nuclear powers by the dozen, a revanchist Germany, a rising sun in