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

[Adam Thornton via TUHS]

Thank you for the excellent Christmas gift!

On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 8:44 PM Jonathan Gray <jsg at jsg.id.au> wrote:

> 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
>