So, I just watched WarGames again for the first time in years. It's a little goofy, and I found myself distracted, trying to figure out where Wm H Macy would show up. John Spencer was easy to pick out as the captain sitting at the launch console at the beginning of the movie who wanted to get someone on the horn before he blew up twenty million people.
But I found it curious to see the give and take between WOPR/Joshua and Lightman/Falken.
After WOPR calls Lightman back at his Seattle phone number, WOPR complains that Falken (who WOPR thinks that he's talking to, even though it's Lightman at this point) is a hard man to get in touch with. You don't find a lot of user interfaces that actually try to seek the user out. At some point later in the movie, McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) says that computers don't call people. That's funny now, because robots call people all the time these days. And email that come from unmanned email addresses are the norm.
Early on in the movie, WOPR invites Falken/Lightman to play a game. ("Shall we play a game?", which strikes me as a nicely formal way of phrasing it, reminiscent of machines that can't use contractions.) Lightman has read the list of games (which was available from the login prompt, which strains credibility as much as anything else in the film), and asks to play "Global Thermonuclear War". In an interesting confirmation interchange, WOPR asks "Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess". Again with the formalism; 'nice' and 'prefer' make it sound like we're talking about a cup of tea. This is fitting - Falken is portrayed as being anti-military, and has a (British?) accent, so he must be more refined. Playing wargames via computer is more the realm of McKittrick who has a neutral US accent, and actually engaging in war is the realm of Beringer, who has a Southern accent. A cheap trope; if you were smarter, you'd hate war, and you'd probably have an accent and extend your little finger while sipping from your teacup.
We have confirmation dialogs today (Are you sure you want to delete this file?), but they're guarding against destructive behavior, they're not usually expressing surprise at a deviation from character. (John never plays Global Thermonuclear War at home!)
Much of the suspense of the movie revolves around getting WOPR to stop racing towards launching nuclear missiles. There's a point where someone presses the "Lock Out" button, which seems to sort of protect against changes in plan. The heroes have to "reason" with WOPR by figuring out that they can log in to the tic-tac-toe program (which has been removed from the games directory... why?) to teach WOPR futility, and that epiphany will immediately translate over to the (simulated?) battle with Russia that it's playing in the other process.
During the tic-tac-toe game, someone makes a comment about WOPR's resource usage; it does seem like the machine, while capable of multiple processes, has turned its attention to "solving" tic-tac-toe.
When I was a kid, my notion of AI was formed by Star Trek and Disney. If you could trick the computer into a contradiction, you could crash their agenda, and maybe even make the hardware explode.
With WOPR, the pattern seems to be that if you can teach the computer a small lesson, the computer will immediately extrapolate and apply that lesson to other running processes.
And, if you watched "Electric Dreams", teaching a computer about love will make them route a disastrous amount of current around the world over the phone grid. But only after you play cello with it, beat it with a baseball bat, and cry on it.
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