[net.games] Can a computer play zork?

jsm (04/08/83)

Randomness is not a problem at all in zork. There is no randomness. zork
is a completely non-random state machine type game. How you do against
the troll or thief depends only on what you have done previously, not on any
random numbers. I discovered this (I'm sure others have also) when I started
getting bored by having to go through all the preliminaries before getting
to an area that I was still trying to solve. I therefore developed "journey"
files which I ran with the input redirected (i.e. zork <journey). These
journey files would save the game at the end so that I could then restart
the game interactively and continue from there. Once I found a sequence that
would kill the troll or thief, that sequence always worked. If the thief
showed up at an inopportune time, I would just slightly change the order
of things I did previously and then he would not show up. Even the round
room is not random.
    I only submitted this article in order to clear up the misunderstanding
about randomness in zork. I am not arguing that zork could be played on
by a computer. There have been many good points brought up pro and con, and
I am not about to get into a debate on the subject. However, if anyone
still doubts that zork is not random, I will be glad to mail him/her
copies of my journey files that they could use so that they could "see it
with their own eyes".
			John S. Marvin
			decvax!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!jsm

dan (04/10/83)

On the contrary, the game of ZORK does contain a (psuedo) random number
generator and the round room code does use it.  I have seen the source.
It would seem likely that some versions of ZORK, particularly those that
were intended to run under RT11 but were munged to run under UNIX, could
fail to set the random number generator seed randomly.

P.S.  The vax native random number generator you get on the DECUS ZORK
tape isn't very random.  It likes to generate numbers that are congruent
mod 8 (or something).  I believe the vax native zork binaries I provided
for a USENIX distribution a few years back use this faulty generator.

		Dan Strick
		[mcnc | decvax] ! idis ! dan