Thread by @realhumanschwab

Zork, the 1977 text-based adventure by Infocom, was cybernetic modeling spyware; it was capable of mining natural language and cognitive heuristics.

"Zork" literally means "unfinished product", the final component was the user's brain.

The DARPA-funded cyberneticists masquerading as game developers taunt gamers in their advertising. The exoteric meaning was that your imagination provided the simulation.

This is true in more ways than one.

Supposedly the game was inspired by ADVENT / Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther. Older accounts say he wrote it on a PDP-10 at MIT. At the time, Crowther was working at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN).

BBN was under contract from ARPA/DARPA and the Navy to create "speech understanding systems" (SUS). They needed this so the NSA could listen to your phone conversations.

The main problem was "ill-formed inputs"; garbled text, weird commands.

The same year Colossal Cave Adventure was released, Crowther's colleagues at BBN published "A Tutoring and Student Modeling Paradigm For Gaming Environments" funded in part under Tri-Service (AFHRL, ARI, NPRDC) and ARPA (HRRO) contract.

To understand why the entire military-industrial-academic complex was interested in "gaming environments", you have to understand the idea of "dynamic modeling" and "cybernetic learning".

Basically, data is used to create models which is then used to create feedback.

Your adventure through this game of Wumpus can be used to create a "learner model" where the Learner's knowledge is overlaid on the complete domain to discover the difference.

In other words, the process of mapping allows an observer to map your model of reality.

Zork was developed by the Dynamic Modeling Group at MIT under J.C.R. Licklider and Al Vezza, pioneers of man-machine symbiosis, and would later take leading roles at Infocom, the game's commercial publisher.

Infocom's board of directors. From left: Marc Blank, Joel Berez (President), Al Vezza, J.C.R. Licklider, Chris Reeve. These were men whose stated goal was to end humanity forever by blending us with machines, supported by billions in DARPA funding, starting a video game company.

Zork was written in Muddle, a programming language designed for their Dynamic Modeling System, with a focus on debugging, testing and quickly implementing new ideas. It was for creating User-Oriented Interactive Computer Graphics.

Licklider's descriptions of the true nature of "dynamic modeling" are rare. Certain papers are not extant on the internet; on occasion he spoke plainly, on "'dynamic hieroglyphs'; graphics projected onto the retina; graphics embedded in AI languages"
schwabstack.substack.com/p/reality-ends…

He says through "interactive dynamic modeling," computer graphics will become a part of
thinking and "command and control".

"Who will the users be? In a phrase, they will be the menials, the mentals, and the masses." (1969)

The year after making Zork and hosting it on the Arpanet, Al Vezza, David Liebling and Tim Anderson presented a paper at Distributed Sensor Nets, a DARPA sponsored workshop, on *language understanding* and AI.

The paper describes a process for creating an "Augmented Transition Network" (ATN) to decipher Morse code chatter and ambiguous inputs. In order to build the ATN grammar, they needed to simulate a network environment, filled with realistic chatter and errors.

Apparently, Muddle's primary use was as an "interpreter", to build programs for the automated assembly of ATN grammars.

Zork was a "distributed sensor" to collect ambiguous inputs from the "mentals", or perhaps from the expert class, as many of Zork fans were professionals.

Zork and Adventure were both hosted on Arpanet for years, but the average PC hobbyist in the 70s was often corporate executive, engineer or lawyer. Much of the equipment was prohibitively expensive, a quarter of Infocom's customers had M.D. in their titles.

While I appreciate your reply, the "far simpler" explanation runs contrary to the proven 20 year history of using games as testbeds for psychological and AI research. Due to the nature of software development, it's possible only one or two people knew...

Cybernetics is the art of turning mass man into golem through technology @MetallicRaptor

Beyond the fact that the games were hosted on the ARPANET for years before their release, here is J.C.R. Licklider, one of the founders of the ARPANET, discussing eavesdropping with ultrasonic frequencies in 1968.

This proves such concepts were familiar to him.

Of course, he would have been aware of the 1967 Spring Joint Computer Conference session organized by Willis Ware which framed early work done by the RAND–NSA network that EXPLICITLY discussed data vulnerabilities by way of EM radiation from processors and memory architecture.

People forget that the NSA has been around since 1952. What do you think they have been doing all this time?

Every part of your computer can be made into an antenna—the display, the keyboard cord, the processor, the RAM, the mouse cord—no internet connection is required. The intelligence community and the military have known this since the 1960s.

It was demonstrated as far back as 1985 that computer components could act as receiver / transmitter with *commercially available equipment*. If a determined hobbyist could do it in 1985, I think ARPA/IC could have pulled it off a few years earlier.

In the context of MK ULTRA, the GATE program, the contemporary STARGATE project— coupled with the long history of using games for AI/cognitive research—it is obvious that if they *desired* such data, they would have acquired it.