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Had great times with this one and the "More Basic Computer Games" book.

My favorites were the Eliza clone, and ICBM, where you are trying to intercept an incoming ICBM with a anti-ballistic missle. My first use of trig functions, which really helped solidify the concepts to me. I also converted the 2-D version to 3-D (with altitude) for even more fun.

I was originally using a TRS-80 Color Computer, with a slightly different dialect of BASIC, so I was usually having to make modifications. Which also helped me learn programming.

Great, great times.

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> I was originally using a TRS-80 Color Computer, with a slightly different dialect of BASIC, so I was usually having to make modifications. Which also helped me learn programming.

Same here! Those two books, along with a ton of magazines and more than a few other books, plus one I found that had "conversions" - helped me greatly to learn programming as a kid.

I eventually found a great book on Fortran graphics - which I also started converting (Fortran and BASIC are very similar).

There's a third book in the "Basic Computer Games" series - I don't recall exactly it's name, but you can probably find it on archive.org. It had a blue cover, and I believed it dealt with much larger, adventure-style games.

Not to mention, there were special editions created for Radio Shack and the TRS-80 as well...

Raise your hands everyone who typed in Eliza clones in the mid-80s and thought you would solve general AI using BASIC in the not-too-distant future.

Between those, tic-tac-toe learning systems, the various 20-questions things...

Later I played with various "expert system" stuff, then there was David L. Heiserman's "Machine Intelligence" and "Robot Intelligence" books...

I tried to understand early neural network stuff, but I could not get my then teenage head around it; in fact, none of it became clear until I took Andrew Ng's "ML Class" in 2011 as an adult (part of the key was understanding the role of linear algebra and matrix math in the system - among other things - that class was the first that explained it very clearly, and the use of octave was also a revelation).

Since that class, I've continued to play with ML/AI, mainly via a couple of courses thru Udacity (including their "self-driving car engineer nanodegree").

So - one could say I still have hope? Ha!

I was a ACM National lecturer and gave a formal version of my Computer Faire talk, EPIC COMPUTER GAMES, written with Lee Hoevel. The talk (and article) described a visit-travel-explore-discover game played in a virtual space. It suggested that the user interface could be natural language, which could be done using an Eliza-like system. Computers then were mostly textual so instead of shooting with laser guns disputes were to be resolved by solving problems or completing riddles.

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