WarGames: My First Encounter with AI

When was the first time you learned about AI? Ask yourself this question, and the answer may astound you and bring back some good memories. Well, at least it did for me.

For me, we will have to time travel back to 1983, to the previous century. I will take you to the cinema, to the movie WarGames, together with my twin brother Jacques and my two best friends Patrick and Dimitri. (I even was able to dig up some old photos from that time.)

Going down memory lane I also went a little overboard with setting the scene. But I think it it is necessary to fully appreciate what impact the movie made on a 14-year-old living in 1983. And with the hindsight I have now it was really fun to re-watch the movie (Yes I actually re watched it).

Digging deeper into my first encounter with (the concept of) AI, I discovered that WarGames is the movie that introduced the public to concepts like computer hacking. In the movie, they are performing Open-Source Intel, even using a playback routine to break out of a room. It is even credited for using the term firewall in the scene where they desperately try to gain control over the supercomputer again. Who would have thought that 30 years later I would start a career in stopping hackers and fraudsters? Certainly not me as a teenager. I was more occupied with Ally Sheedy and her lovely dimples when she smiles.

I will also throw in some other experiences that came on my path going back in time. Isaac Asimov, Stanislav Petrov, and Garry Kasparov made a lasting impression, and I will tell you why. Please feel free to share your first encounter with AI in the comments and if it was as eye-opening for you as it was for me.

This article is a prelude of my next two articles which will be on AI and security. The next month of October is after all the Cyber Security Awareness Month. And here is a fun YouTube clip from Elle Cordova who is comparing the greatest inventions of Humankind to each other and to AI: Inventions hanging out (youtube.com)

Flashback to the 80s, setting the scene.

Let us go back to October 1983, the month the movie was released in the Netherlands. For those who are not that old, let me set the scene to understand the background against which I saw this movie. I was 14 years old, going to high school, doing my homework, and hanging out with my twin brother Jacques and best friends Patrick and Dimitry. There was no internet for us: when we wanted to know something, we could only ask the people we knew. Or, if we were lucky, we could use the encyclopaedia at home. An encyclopaedia is a very large number of big heavy books that contain information on a wide range of subjects or a particular field of knowledge. The subjects were in alphabetical order, and there was so much text that over 30 books were needed to cover everything. Or you had to jump on your bicycle and ride to the public library and look it up.

Around that time, we got our first computer, a Sinclair, and the computer game?Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. He won the decathlon gold medal at the Olympic Games in 1980 and 1984 and broke the world record for the event four times. He was unbeaten in competition for nine years. We played?Daley Thompson’s Decathlon?so many hours in a row that at night, lying in bed, we could still hear all the game sounds, and we had blisters on the palms of our hands from using the joystick to control the characters in the game. We had to load the game from a cassette player (I hope some of you still know what a cassette player is).

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Some pictures from the 1980s of the four of us. We asked a friend to take photos of us. Inspired by LP covers from bands like U2 and Simple Minds, we posed for the camera. In those days, you used film cameras, which required loading a roll of film that allowed for 24 photos. You had to wait to finish the roll, and that could take a long time. Once all the photos were taken, the film roll needed to be rewound back into its canister to avoid exposure to light because this could ruin the images. After which, you had to take it to a store with a photo processing service. Typically, it took about a week to get your photos back. Once the photos were ready, you would return to the store to pick up your prints along with the developed negatives and finally see if they were any good.

Cold War

The Cold War was still a real thing in those days. Imagine you’re a high school kid, and you grew up during that time. There was real tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was fuelled by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to increased hostilities and a U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. It sparked a new surge in the arms race. The world’s nuclear arsenal ballooned in the mid-1980s. The USA and Soviet Union had a staggering 64 thousand nuclear warheads in the mid-80s. Enough to blow up the earth several times.

During the 80s, Reagan was the president of the USA, and he adopted a hard-line stance against the Soviet Union. He is famous for calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and initiating the Strategic Defense Initiative (the Star Wars program meant to build an umbrella of missile defence systems intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic nuclear missiles).

The threat of nuclear war was a constant concern, leading to widespread public fear (certainly with me, when I was young) and numerous protests demanding peace and détente (Yes, I use big words as history was one of my favourite classes in high school. It means the easing of strained relations between the two superpowers).

?Also, in my country, the people protested the nuclear arms race and demanded disarmament and peace. NATO wanted to deploy more and more nuclear weapons. In the Netherlands, they wanted to station the neutron bomb (often referred to as the “proton bomb”). The Dutch peace movement was strong in those years, and there was widespread public opposition against NATO’s plans to station these weapons in the Netherlands. You must know that a neutron bomb is designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation while minimizing the physical blast damage. Its primary destructive force is the intense burst of neutron radiation, which is highly effective at penetrating armour and killing every living organism in its blast radius.

As a high school kid, I also worried about the Cold War becoming a hot war. And in those days, buttons were all the rage. I too had them on my jeans jacket. One of them you can see below: stop the bomb. I did not believe that deterrence was a good solution. Peace seemed to me a better solution.

WarGames

Now that I have set the scene, you will better understand how we experienced this movie. Against this background, my twin brother Jacques, together with our two best friends Patrick and Dimitri, and I went to the cinema. To this day, I really love the cinema: the big screen, the popcorn, the sound system which was great and in stereo compared to listening to television at home which was still in mono for the first part of the 80s. The thrill of the expectation and then the movie started. Mind you, we had no reference material, no Netflix to endlessly watch movies. No internet with YouTube clips about war. This was all new and exciting to us. And this story would make a lasting impact:

Summary of the movie

Spoiler alert: you can still watch the movie, and if you intend to, you probably want to skip the next paragraph.

The Department of Defense was disappointed in the performance of its soldiers. During exercises, it turned out some of them had a conscience which stopped them from launching nuclear weapons, thus triggering World War III and ending the human race. To eliminate the human factor from the equation, they had their scientists design a supercomputer called WOPR. It has Artificial Intelligence to calculate the best response in case of an attack by the USSR.

?In comes our hero, played by Matthew Broderick, a young computer whiz kid. He knows his way around computers, which he demonstrates by hacking into the school computer and changing his grades (at that time, I did not know this would be called hacking in the future).

He also changes the grades for his friend and classmate Jennifer Mack (Ally Sheedy). While looking for the newest and hottest game, he accidentally connects into this top-secret supercomputer which has complete control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He sees a list of games, but he cannot play them. He needs a password to get in. Two of his hacker friends explain the concept of a backdoor password and suggest doing some research (later I would learn this is called Open-Source Intelligence OSINT: to be able to get to the password). Matthew Broderick discovers that Stephen Falken is the scientist that created the computer. He is an early artificial intelligence researcher. And diving into the history of Stephen, he learns about his dead son’s name “Joshua”. He guesses correctly that this is the backdoor password.

He hacks into the computer and the computer challenges him to play a game. And next to chess the game called Global Thermonuclear War between America and Russia really sound interesting. By accepting the game, he starts the countdown to World War III without knowing it.

Matthew Broderick learns the true nature of his actions from a news broadcast, and the FBI arrests him and takes him to NORAD (the bunker of the DoD in which WOPR is placed). He then escapes NORAD by using a Play Back routine (yes it was on the screen as early as 1983) and joining a tourist group to get out of the bunker. With the help of Ally Sheedy, he travels to the Oregon island where the widowed Falken now lives under a new identity. They convince Falken that he should return to NORAD to stop WOPR.

They arrive at NORAD where the DoD already went to DEFCON Level 1 (highest level of alert). They try to get into WOPR with a Brute Force attack, but they cannot get past the Firewall (the movie is the first one ever to use the term Firewall in the script). All attempts to log in and order WOPR to cancel the countdown fail, and all weapons will launch if the computer is disabled. Luckily Matthey Broderick is here to save the day. He directs the computer to play Tic-Tac-Toe against itself. This results in a long string of draws, forcing the computer to learn the concept of futility. WOPR almost obtains the missile code for the launch, but before launching, it cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, finding they too all result in stalemates.

The computer concludes that nuclear warfare is "a strange game"; having discovered the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction ("WINNER: NONE"), therefore "the only winning move is not to play." And then this scene ends with the legendary words typed by

WOPR: Greetings, Professor Falken.

Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.

WOPR: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

and the supercomputer gives back the control of NORAD and the missiles. World War III has been avoided.

When the movie ended the four of us were blown away. We too, played computer games. We too, were high school kids. We too, were afraid of the cold war. We could totally relate and found the movie awesome. And of course I fell a little bit in love with the Ally Sheedy.

40 year later

Who would have thought that 30 years later I would start a career in stopping hackers and fraudsters? Certainly not me as a teenager. I was more occupied with Ally Sheedy and her lovely dimples when she smiled.

It was not until 40 years later, when I was preparing a presentation on AI, that I went back to the movie. I was looking for my first encounter with AI as a nice icebreaker to start the presentation with. Digging deeper into my first encounter with the concept of AI, I discovered that WarGames is the movie that introduced the public to concepts like computer hacking. In the movie, they perform Open-Source Intel, even using a playback routine to break out of a room. It is even credited with using the term firewall in the scene where they desperately try to gain control over the machine again.

Stanislav Petrov

Memories about this movie also kept on popping up over the next years. For Example, years later I read about this event, and it made me think of the opening scene of the movie in which one of the two soldiers cannot turns the key and push the button to launch the nuclear missile.

The story was about Stanislav Petrov who is credited with single-handedly stopping World War III. In September 1983, Petrov was the duty officer at the command centre for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm. His decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, prevented an erroneous retaliatory attack, which in turn would have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war. An investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned. Because of his decision not to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike amid this incident, Petrov is often credited with having “saved the world.”

Isaac Asimov

It also brought me back to one of the science fiction authors I read in my youth: Isaac Asimov. I do love science fiction. Reading books and TV Series. He introduced me to the three laws of robotics, which robots needed to follow in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround.” Even in 1942 people were already imagining about Artificial Intelligence and how not to harm people. The three laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Hollywood

I already told you I love watching movies. Dozens of Hollywood movies which I watched during my life are about Artificial Intelligence and its impact on humankind. Some gems I watched are 2001: A Space Odyssey the HAL 9000 Computer is a non-human and central character in the that uses the mechanical, sensing, and information systems under its control. Aliens in which the character Bishop is an Android helping Sigourney Weaver to survive. And of course, the Terminator movie and Ghost in a shell comes to mind and also, I Robot. The animation movies Iron Giant and WALL-E are some great examples. I can go on and on.

Garry Kasparov vs Deep Blue

It also brought me back to an event that made an impression on me when I was 27. A supercomputer won a chess game against grandmaster Garry Kasparov. And I remember thinking were will this end? Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov was a pair of six-game chess matches between then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov and an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. Kasparov won the first match, held in Philadelphia in 1996, by 4–2. Deep Blue won a 1997 rematch held in New York City by 3?–2?. The second match was the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer under tournament conditions and was the subject of a documentary film, Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine.

Memory lane

Going back in time brought back some good memories. It was also a real surprise to me to learn that in this movie, not only does Artificial Intelligence play an important role, but also hacking. I discovered that?WarGames?is the movie that introduced the public to concepts like computer hacking, Open-Source Intel, and playback routines—all those things I learned about 30 years later when I started a career in Cyber Security and began preparing for CISSP. Please feel free to share your first encounter with AI in the comments and if it was as eye-opening for you as it was for me.

And watch out for my next two articles which will be on AI and security. The next month of October is after all the Cyber Security Awareness Month.