[jibal]

I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy.

An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)

Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.

Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).

I also shared a cubicle wall with another Van Nuys High alumni, Jon Postel, aka "God of the Internet". Sartorially, Jon was the complete opposite of Vint--long scraggly beard, blue jeans, forever barefoot--but those weren't the things that mattered. Man, those were the days.

[foobarian]

Wow that's wild. Our org spent years playing jotto on office whiteboards before Covid. There would just be games going in random places.

[treyd]

Sounds like he was frustrated he lost and thought the program was a lot more clever than it was. :)

[jibal]

He was disappointed in himself that he hadn't realized that the word recognition "algorithm" was just "every word starting with a-l" -- he had speculated that there was in fact some sort of linguistic algorithm to determine whether a word was valid, not just a built-in hemi-dictionary.

And he was disappointed in me or the program or the nature of reality that the play algorithm was so simple and dumb ... but it was a slow machine with limited memory, and doing better is actually quite hard and I hadn't invested the time to do so.