Re: [TUHS] Gaming on early Unix

I wrote a very simple game for my son -- go fish. It was one of my first C programs (that is evident by the fact that it contains several goto's). There is the source code in one of the BSD distributions, dated 1980 (with a UCB copyright...). The original game simply played cards at random from its hand, and was pretty easy to beat. Then I realized that there was a simple strategy -- if the player asked the program for, e.g., a 5, the program remembered that the player had a 5. If it later drew a 5 it immediately asked for it. This "pro" version was very hard to beat, to the extent that nobody wanted to play it. So I made the pro version an option--the default was the dumb mode. It didn't get a lot of hype, but I did face an irate user once at a Usenix meeting who publicly accused me of cheating (since the program did, in fact, know what the player's had was). The pro option was that good, but, unless somebody changed a copy of it, the user's hand wasn't part of the strategy... Looking at the code a couple of months ago, I found at least one bug and one logical error. The bug would have been caught by Lint, but that program was many years in the future. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Salz" &lt;rich.salz(a)gmail.com&gt; To:<ron@ronnatalie.com> Cc:"TUHS main list" &lt;tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org&gt; Sent:Fri, 6 Dec 2019 11:39:42 -0500 Subject:Re: [TUHS] Gaming on early Unix Was that "hunt" that came with BSD 4-something?