As it turns out, Digital Equipment Corporations’s “Space War”, which I’ve previously discussed, was not the only technologically ground-breaking game made interactive on DEC’s PDP-1 computer. Fifty years ago this year, an ancient Near-Eastern game, “Kalah,” was also programmed by MIT students for this computer. In its traditional form, it required the movement of stones from one’s “pits” as illustrated above.
During the course of the game, “stones” are removed from each player’s pits, and are cast into the Kalahs (or goals), but are never removed from them. The game ends when one player’s pits are entirely empty. The other player then casts the stones remaining in his pits into his kalah. At this point, the player with more stones in his Kalah would win. The way the MIT students designed it was very much like computer chess: you would play against the computer itself.
Not long after the game was developed in 1959, it was played remotely on DEC’s PDP system, where one party, on a computer terminal in California, was able to play the game with another sitting at a similar terminal at DEC’s headquarters in Maynard. This was the first time such an interactive computer game had been played remotely. This proved a very popular game for many years following. Copies of Digital’s original notes on the game are included in the archive of the Computer History Museum.
Illustration credit: The Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.
– Christopher Hartman
