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