106 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
106 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
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Date: 17 March 1981 13:59 est
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From: York.Multics at MIT-Multics (William M. York)
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Subject: The Paging Game
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To: sipb at MIT-MC, info-cobol at MIT-AI
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The following appeared in a recent issue of "Multing", an on-line
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magazine distributed on one of Honeywell's internal Multics systems.
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-WMY
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This note is a formal non-working paper of the Project MAC
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Computer Systems Research Division. It should be reproduced and
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distributed wherever levity is lacking, and may be referenced at
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your own risk in other publications.
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The Paging Game
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By Jeff Berryman
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RULES
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1. Each player gets several million things.
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2. Things are kept in crates that hold 4096 things each.
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Things in the same crate are called crate-mates.
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3. Crates are stored either in the workshop or the warehouse.
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The workshop is almost always too small to hold all
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the crates.
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4. There is only one workshop but there may be several
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warehouses. Everybody shares them.
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5. Each thing has its own thing number.
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6. What you do with a thing is to zark it. Everybody
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takes turns zarking.
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7. You can only zark your things, not anybody else's.
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8. Things can only be zarked when they are in the
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workshop.
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9. Only the Thing King knows whether a thing is in the
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workshop or in a warehouse.
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10. The longer a thing goes without being zarked, the
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grubbier it is said to become.
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11. The way you get things is to ask the Thing King.
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He only gives out things in multiples of eight.
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This is to keep the royal overhead down.
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12. The way you zark a thing is to give its thing
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number. If you give the number of a thing that happens
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to be in a workshop it gets zarked right away. If it
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is in a warehouse, the Thing King packs the crate
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containing your thing back into the workshop. If there
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is no room in the workshop, he first finds the grubbiest
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crate in the workshop, whether it be yours or somebody
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else's, and packs it off with all its crate-mates to a
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warehouse. In its place he puts the crate containing
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your thing. Your thing then gets zarked and you never
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know that it wasn't in the workshop all along.
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13. Each player's stock of things have the same numbers as
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everybody else's. The Thing King always knows who owns
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what thing and whose turn it is, so you can't ever
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accidentally zark somebody else's thing even if it has the
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same thing number as one of yours.
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NOTES
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1. Traditionally, the Thing King sits at a large, segmented
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table and is attended to by pages (the so-called "table
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pages") whose job it is to help the king remember where
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all the things are and who they belong to.
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2. One consequence of Rule 13 is that everybody's thing
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numbers will be similar from game to game, regardless
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of the number of players.
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3. The Thing King has a few things of his own, some of
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which move back and forth between workshop and warehouse
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just like anybody else's, but some of which are just
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too heavy to move out of the workshop.
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4. With the given set of rules, oft-zarked things tend to
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get kept mostly in the workshop while little-zarked
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things stay mostly in a warehouse. This is efficient
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stock control.
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5. Sometimes even warehouses get full. The Thing King
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then has to start piling things on the dump out back.
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This makes the game slower because it takes a long time
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to get things off the dump when they are needed in the
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workshop. A forthcoming change in the rules will allow
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the Thing King to select the grubbiest things in the
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warehouses and send them to the dump in his spare time,
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thus keeping the warehouses from getting too full.
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This means that the most infrequently-zarked things will
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end up in the dump so the Thing King won't have to get
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things from the dump so often. This should speed up
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the game when there are a lot of players and the warehouses
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are getting full.
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LONG LIVE THE THING KING
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