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