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”There are records of games played over radio, on telephone lines, satellite, … forums, and email.” My father went to a boarding school. In defiance of his ho
by gorgoiler 10mo ago
”There are records of games played over radio, on telephone lines, satellite, … forums, and email.”
My father went to a boarding school. In defiance of his housemaster’s nightly curfew, he and his friend would play cross-dormitory chess using the heating pipes as a medium for Morse code tapped out on the radiators.
It was just the two of them playing through a wall. It would be a fun exercise to implement a fully manual pipe tapping protocol that implements addressing, collision avoidance, retransmission, and distributed consensus. So much fun in fact — and I think this site is definitely a safe space to admit one’s sense of “fun” being quite niche — that it surely must have been done already. TCP/IP/Ethernet: The board game (?)
- kqr 10mo agoDid they somehow find a way to make a long tap (e.g. slide something against the radiator for a continuous signal) or did they agree on two different kinds of short taps? (Or do the pipes resonate for long but can be dampened by hand to produce a short tap?)
- cwillu 10mo agoI believe the usual thing is to essentially encode it by the spaces between the taps, rather than the taps themselves.
- kqr 10mo agoBut then how does one distinguish between letters? Something like "ETA" would be difficult to tell apart from "II".
- qingcharles 10mo agoI used this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code