The Murky Origins of Zork's Name 70
mjn writes "Computational media researcher Nick Montfort traces the murky origins of Zork's name. It's well known that the word was used in MIT hacker jargon around that time, but how did it get there? Candidates are the term 'zorch' from late 1950s DIY electronics slang, the use of the term as a placeholder in some early 1970s textbooks, the typo a QWERTY user would get if he typed 'work' on an AZERTY keyboard, and several uses in obscure sci-fi. No solid answers so far, though, as there are problems with many of the possible explanations that would have made MIT hackers unlikely to have run across them at the right time."
Re:Trivia (Score:5, Funny)
Nethack (Score:4, Funny)
The oracle asks for a donation of 1000 zorkmids to ponder your question..
Re:Trivia (Score:5, Funny)
These jokes are getting a little twisty on me. All alike.
Re:Trivia (Score:3, Funny)
You see a seedy looking heckler carrying a large bag.
Parallel invention? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It is pitch black. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nethack (Score:1, Funny)
The Oracle scornfully takes all your money and says:
"it is rather disconcerting to be confronted with the following theorem from [Baker, Gill, and Solovay, 1975].
Theorem 7.18 There exist recursive languages and B such that
(1) P(A) == NP(A), and
(2) P(B) != NP(B)
This provides impressive evidence that the techniques that are currently available will not suffice for proving that P != NP or that P == NP." [Garey and Johnson, p. 185.]