When I was twelve years old I implemented my very first computer program. I didn’t have any knowledge of programming, and they didn’t teach any courses in our middle school, so I needed to figure it out for myself.<\/p>\n
It was an odd little computer, that I just happened to come upon in the school library. It was really more of a programmable calculator with a paper tape that printed numerical results. Its programming language, such as it was, was a kind of weird assembly language — although I wouldn’t learn about the term “assembly language” until some years later.<\/p>\n
I decided to write a program to play a game of tic-tac-toe. To do this, I needed to store which of the nine squares had an X, and which squares had an O. Except this little programmable calculator didn’t support arrays, so I had to figure out another way.<\/p>\n
If I’d known more, I would have used some kind of binary encoding. But all I knew was that the calculator could store extremely large numbers. So instead I used what now seems like a really crazy scheme.<\/p>\n
I figured out that if you multiply any the numbers from 61 through 69 together, you always get a result that isn’t a multiple of any of the numbers you didn’t<\/i> use. For example, if 61*62*64*66*67 is not a multiple of 63 or 65 or 68 or 69.<\/p>\n
This works for any such combination of the numbers 61 through 69. It doesn’t work for any consecutive run of numbers smaller than that — I checked.<\/p>\n
I used that scheme to encode which squares had Xs and which squares had Os. After that, it was easy to program a tic-tac-toe game.<\/p>\n
Now that I think back on it, this was a very weird approach to the problem of storing combinations of nine numbers in a computer. But hey, it worked! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was twelve years old I implemented my very first computer program. I didn’t have any knowledge of programming, and they didn’t teach any courses in our middle school, so I needed to figure it out for myself. It was an odd little computer, that I just happened to come upon in the school … Continue reading “When I was twelve years old”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20728"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20729,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20728\/revisions\/20729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}