My favorite (other than Nuke the Smileys) was written at the UofT by Hugh Redelmeier. It was a version of tic-tac-toe that played only a single line, and would always win. If it didn't like your move, it changed it. If your move was a good one, it would change its previous move. And it did this with lovely little messages. It was fun watching people get upset at it.

I don't know where the source is nowadays. I may have it somewhere, or it might be ferric dust long since swept up from a cupboard of failed 9-track tapes.

-rob

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019 at 11:47 AM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Dec 8, 2019, at 5:35 PM, Ken Thompson via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> in the early 70s, noone had seen a computer.
> i had a terminal at home and we were giving
> a dinner party. i wrote several games for the
> party from the back of an off-the-shelf puzzle
> book.
>
> the ones i remember:
>
> moo (bulls + cows)
> hunt the wumpus (move or shoot)
> learning tic-tac-toe
> i can guess your number (divide and conquer)
> jealous husbands (similar to fox hen corn)
> nim
>
> i think there were more. they went over
> pretty well at the party.
>
> i think this was 1969 or 1970.

Clarification, please.

Was “Hunt the Wumpus” from the back of an off-the-shelf puzzle book? I thought it was by Gregory Yob (per the Creative Computing BASIC Computer Games book—Wumpus may have been in More BASIC Computer Games), and, well, it’s about dodecahedronal geometry, which seems as if it would only have been found in a rather rarefied puzzle book, but does seem like the sort of Platonic solid a computer-programming nerd in the early 1970s would have known about.

Adam