A few days ago while aimlessly surfing the world wide web’s waves, I came across Vintage Basic.
I don’t even remember what weird tangent I had gone on to find it, perhaps something related to reading about Lisp and old computers, I don’t even know. While there, I saw their collection of old BASIC games. I felt so grateful, since I remembered them from my days as a child on my beloved Apple II/E. The computer still works, but a girl who will remain nameless (especially since I now host her blog) lost all the discs. I still feel rather annoyed about that, but this helped a little.
In the course of downloading and running these great old programs, I found guess.bas, a simple number guessing game. I wouldn’t have gotten it, except that I remembered it.
] catalog A 005 GUESS.BAS
Does that conjure any memories for anyone? I recreated how it might look as best as possible. The game works very simply: you put in the maximum number, the computer picks a number between 1 and the maximum, and you enter your guesses. The computer tells you if you guessed too high or too low. Simple, right?
Two lines of code caught my eye, however.
11 L1=INT(LOG(L)/LOG(2))+1
56 PRINT "YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO GET IT IN ONLY";L1
After getting the maximum number in the variable L, it assigns INT(LOG(L)/LOG(2)) to the variable L1. In other words, it adds one to the integer (whole number) part of log base 2 of L. Why, I wondered, did it use this value for the number of guesses it should take you to guess a number?
For those who slept in math, the logarithm refers to the exponent that indicates the power to which a base number is raised to produce a given number. For example, the logarithm of 100 to the base number of 10 is 2. Since I slept a lot in English class, I ripped that definition off from my dictionary. I thought about the relation between logs, exponents, bases, multiplication, division, anything I could think of that might solve this fun little mystery.
I took a shower, and my mind wandered. I began thinking about how I would actually solve the problem myself. If I had to choose a number between 1 and 10, I would first guess5, the halfway point. That way, the answer would automatically eliminate half the numbers. I would then continue this process, each time eliminating half, narrowing down until i guessed the number. I think most people would solve the problem in the same way. It then hit me! The integer part of log base 2 + 1 would roughly compute this number. It makes total sense! Think about it! To illustrate, if L=10, then L1=4.
I find it interesting to reflect on this. You can tell a lot about a person and the time period by analyzing code. That fragment told me that whoever wrote that dinky little program probably had a background in math or computer science. Today’s kids pumped full of Java probably don’t even know what a logarithm even does! I took standard math in high school, then in college I took three awful semesters of discrete math followed by two semesters of calculus – pure Hell. Any system that bases itself completely around limits just doesn’t jive with my world view. To me, such a proposition denies the limitless nature of the universe and the soul, but I digress. I love all the wonderful opportunities modern home computing has brought to the masses, but sometimes I long for the days when you actually had to KNOW about computers and have some command of programming and math to use one. I confess it took me a little to figure out this mystery, but I think I did. Many greater than myself have come before, and
many will come after. I saw an entire legacy encapsulated in two lines of code. Don’t forget.
