Replicants as Assistants

When Oscar Vermeulen and Obsolescence Guaranteed released the PiDP-10 in 2024, the first stirrings of decwar.org began immediately. The long range vision was to get Decwar working on the PiDP-10 and create a welcoming experience. Two years later, out of the blue Oscar has suddenly appeared again with another piece of the puzzle. Oscar posted about his new Hermes-based project on the Retro Computing Forum on Tuesday, and by Friday morning it was working with Decwar within a new decwar.org repo downstream from Oscar's repo. The picture at the top of this post is a screenshot from the first few minutes with the Decwar version actively playing the game. Thanks to Oscar's usual excellent work preparing and documenting everything, it took just a few hours to go from zero to:

• Coach: you operate the game; Hermes explains the screen and suggests one move at a time.
• Assist: Hermes recommends moves and waits for your approval before sending each one.
• Play: ask Hermes to play for you; it can make game moves directly and explain its decisions.

It was a thrilling experience, seeing how smoothly and capably the replicant integrated itself into the interface between human and game, which is of course purely textual with Decwar. This is one of the special things about the game. It's purely text in a telnet session. Nothing more. What was so surprising was how an elegant, and even beautiful, modern text environment, with a replicant assistant guiding everything smoothly along, adds to the spirit of things. A realistic VT52 experience has a unique beauty. So does the other end of the spectrum, with a leading-edge environment and the new types of experiences that become possible.

Could the replicants grow beyond assistants to also bring in things like personalities and ambience from the Southwest Texas State computation center terminal room circa 1984? When decwar.org began evolving back in 2024, that was already very much in mind, and Oscar's work is a solid step in that direction. Right now, a Decwar replicant is a docker container. When it's possible to have everything internal within the container, completely standalone and no external dependencies or costs, the stage will be set. Running ten standalone containers with ten different personalities could become a normal everyday thing.