#031 - Boomerang Puzzle: I Know the Greeks Invented Everything, but Boomerangs?

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC Type-In)

Genre: Puzzle, Non-Game

Developer(s): David H. Ahl, Nicomachus (I can explain!)

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

It seems like a bizarre place to go, but I'm about to go on a short diatribe about Greek philosophers on a video game blog. The Greeks invented everything, don't ya know?

Anyway... we owe a lot to the Ancient Greek philosophers. Much of what we know and understand about the world was originally discovered by them, as well as methods of understanding. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pythagoras - we could go on listing them. Another of these names, certainly not as well known as those I just listed, is Nicomachus of Gerasa. The distinction needs to be made, for there are several notable individuals named Nicomachus. Technically, Nicomachus of Gerasa isn't a Greek, but a Roman, for Gerasa was in Roman Syria - which is today in modern Jordan. Greco-Roman culture had a lot of overlapping though, so you could excuse thinking Nicomachus was a Greek. He was, after all, inspired by one of the great Greeks - Pythagoras. Nicomachus was a Neopythagorean philosopher, which was a movement concerned with the revival of Pythagoras' teachings. For reference, Pythagoras lived in the 6th century BC, whereas Nicomachus lived in the 1st century AD - about 600 years after Pythagoras. Nicomachus was primarily interested in the study of arithmetic and music, and produced his most notable work on the former of these - his Introduction to Arithmetic.

Artist's rendition of Nicomachus. This picture looks funny.

All of this is relevant, I promise...

Nicomachus' Introduction to Arithmetic became the standard mathematics textbook for over 1000 years. Supposedly, an arithmetic puzzle was derived from this book which was given the nickname "boomerang." Unless the Greeks invented those, too, this is a rather anachronistic nickname. This puzzle involves being able to guess a number between 1 and 100 based on the result of dividing it by either 3, 5, or 7 and the remainder.

That's David Ahl's explanation of it, anyway. He took this puzzle and digitized it for today's Boomerang Puzzle, including it in 101 BASIC Computer Games. The trouble is, I scanned through the entire Introduction to Arithmetic to find Ahl's source for the puzzle, and couldn't find what he was referring to. There wasn't really anything close to what he described, in fact. There's a "sieve" method referenced, but that doesn't even belong to Nicomachus.

Artist's rendition of... something. This picture looks terrifying.

Maybe there's a writing of Nicomachus' I've missed - Ahl cites his source as the "Arithmetica," which I assume is Introduction to Arithmetic under a different name, as no results appear when searching for "Arithmetica" online. Ahl was very insistent on the puzzle originating from Nicomachus - so much so that he titled the game after him - NICOMA in the original book, Nicomachus in the microcomputer edition. If anyone does know what Ahl's source is, please let me know in the comments.

So, maybe Nicomachus actually isn't that relevant after all...

Regardless, there's still a game to be played.

Or is there? 

To be perfectly frank, after playing Boomerang Puzzle, I don't actually think it's a game. This is more of a novelty program than anything. It's a "pick a number between 1 and 100" guessing game, along the lines of earlier games Trap and Stars. However, it's not you guessing the number this time - the computer is doing the "guessing." Role reversal! You think of a number and, based on the remainder of the number after being divided by 3, then 5, and finally 7, the computer knows exactly what number you chose.

At least Ahl got the date right.

I messed up my sums with my first number choice - 97. Second time around I got it right and the computer - as expected - guessed my number. One who is more obsessed than I may consider running through every number just to see if there's any chink in the computer's armour. I got up to about 14 before I got bored.

My arithmetic was indeed in error.

I must admit, I'm rather disappointed. This has ended on quite an anticlimax. All that talk of history and Greco-Roman philosophers, which is of great interest to me, built Boomerang Puzzle up to be something quite interesting. Alas, it was not. All we've ended up with is something of a novelty educational program.

In case it wasn't already obvious, I'm not giving this a score - I can't classify Boomerang Puzzle as a game; there isn't really any "gameplay" to speak of. Boomerang Puzzle is merely a novelty showcase of what you can do with coding algorithms. The only sense in which there's "gameplay" is doing your sums properly so as to not confuse the computer. It tells you when you're wrong anyway, and you just try again. No penalty for getting it wrong. In that sense, it has some use in teaching basic division with remainders, so I could argue that it's something of an educational program at least. Maybe "winning" is getting the computer to guess your number correctly? I'm clutching at straws at this point. I stand by my decision. Can't help but be disappointed, though.

Hopefully, next time, we have something more interesting.