Tetris
A long time ago I worked in the Green Building (building 54 at MIT).
Several NASA Apollo lunar missions (I think 11, 12, 14… I know it wasn’t 13 J ) placed seismometers on the moon, in various locations. They didn’t detect earthquakes. The Moonquakes were quite small but still measurable.
At a summer job I was helping a grad student run computer programs written in Fortran. I’d go to the computer building where there were several IBM 029 card punch machines available at the building. I maintained a deck of computer punch cards that had the program and data on it. Fortran requires that code lines start at column 7 or greater, so I was good at setting the tab stops on the punch machine. I’d modify the deck, submit it, and wait a few hours for the resulting paper printout.
Our goal was to take the lunar data and try to determine the internal layers of the moon (just as our earth has a crust, mantle, etc.). Given seismic readings from at least 3 synchronized seismometers, analysis of the signals could determine the wave aberrations as they travel through various internal lunar densities, yielding layer depths, densities, hints to composition, etc.
Apparently the whole building has been turned into a Tetris game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODR5_RxZRks
This implies:
1. 1 or many computers are controlling the lights of each room
a. There could be 1 master computer, which implies the whole building wiring needs to be altered somewhat.
b. 1 CPU per room, communicating with each other. This could mean less infrastructure change: just put a module in each room’s light switch.
2. The room has several colored lights, so someone had to install them, as well as configure power to each of them. Perhaps each light had its own computer too, perhaps communicating wirelessly
3. Playing at night only
4. Half the windowed rooms needs to be instrumented: IIRC, only 2 sides have windows on the rectangular cross section building.
5. Some students had spare time
6. Breaching security somehow. I remember hearing that security in the building was very tight. It was the tallest building on campus, and to discourage suicides, access, especially to the roof, was somewhat restricted.
After having written this, I see a detailed description of the Green Building Hack at Wikipedia
See also: