[TUHS] cubic (was: unix v4 tape found)

[Jonathan Gray via TUHS]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 05:17:35PM -0700, Adam Thornton via TUHS wrote:
> "cubic" exists both here and on the v7 I have.  There don't seem to be
> sources, though, at least not in the obvious places.
> 
> I went looking online, and didn't find much besides Patashnik's 1980 paper
> (the acknowledgements there are a lovely rogues' gallery of exactly who'd
> you'd expect).
> 
> I think (based on the oral history interview) that cubic here is probably a
> Ken program.

"Some of the things Ken wrote on the PDP-7 by 1969 include
...
A graphical-interface 3D tic-tac-toe program (4x4x4) run with the light pen."
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/ken-games.html

"His early work has been on MULTICS, file system design and simulation,
computer chess, cubic (3D) tic-tac-toe, and language implementation."
K Thompson, The Unix Command Language, 1976
https://archive.org/details/theunixcommandlanguage

> 
> I was playing with it, but trying to keep the board state in my head rather
> than on paper (which was a mistake) and was intrigued by the fact that it
> found a forced loss for me and laid it out for me.
> 
> My question is, do the sources to "cubic" exist anywhere?
> 
> Adam

https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/ttt1.s
	jms messg; i>;040;w>;i>;n>;0
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/blob/master/src/cmd/ttt2.s

tuhs Applications/Dennis_Tapes/dmr_tapes.tgz
games/ttt-play/
games/ttt-solve/
contain .s files with '3d tic-tac-toe' comments

'I have a force win' is in
games/ttt-play/ot1.s