This page accompanies a "Weekly Zoom Social", held Sunday, September 15, 2024. Here is how the talk was promoted:
John Miller started an index of MATHEMATICAL GAMES in the 1970’s on 80-column computer punch cards for his own use. The index underwent several transformations (as did MG!) before it found a permanent home on the world wide web. John will tell stories and invite discussion on an "ideal" index.
The index has all the Title lines for all 297 Math Games columns in SciAm, by month/year PLUS subsequent incarnations of the column! It's been online for about 25 years.
The index came back to our attention last week, when a guy contacted me with a correction to the May 1969 entry "The rambling random walk and its gambling equivalent". — Almost a tongue Twister!
ANYWAY (I held up a single computer Punch Card.)
A punch card has 80 columns. The index had some Format .. like "MM YY TITLE" (Title max was 76 characters). Note also - KEY PUNCHES were ALL UPPERCASE!
Since this index was for my own use, I sometimes abbreviated titles. I compiled the tiles from my personal SciAm collection and older issues at the Library.
Show 300 deck of blank cards. However! The card index was never 300 cards! See why below.
I migrated the data records (AKA cards) from the IBM 1130 system to VAX 11/780.
At the time, it would have been ~180 cards, not 300. [May 1964 (#89)] to [May 1979 (#269)] The cards were probably recycled.
Martin was still Writing columns! I could edit lines of a text file on the VAX - and list the file on a printer.
(Historical Marker) Martin alternated with DRH, then "retired" in December (Laffer Curve)
While on Sabattical, I finished compiling the Subject lines of the columns by visiting the Portland State University library to peruse months earlier than in my own collection. (L&C Library had dumped their copies?? I don't recall. I do recall seeing some very old bound Sci Ams!)
I imported records into a Apple Macintosh spreadsheet for ease of editing.
I don't recollect when or just how I converted the UPPERCASE to Mixed Case.
When WWW came along, I used Perl to generate an HTML table from CSV text file. (I no longer do this -- just edit HTML as needed.)
This index was originally posted on LCLARK.EDU with Martin's permission in 1999.
I showed/read MARTIN's Aug 99 letter granting permission.
Martin Dies.
I had left the college in 1997, and was finally losing access to the lclark.edu web service, so I set the index up on dialectrix.com with all my other web content.
In retirement, I indexed subsequent incarnations, such as Meta-magical Themas at PSU Library, and added them all to the index.
On October 23rd 2014, we moved the index to martin-gardner.org for posterity.
At some point, these entries cried out to be categorized, so I tried that and came up with 20 obvious categories.
"?" means uncategorized.
I don't have an index grouped by category. That would be good. Better yet, some wizardry → Self-sorting! The index is Searchable via Find in a web browser.
During Centennial (2014) we found that Sci AM / Nature / had a page for each column on their web site, but no overall listing per se. (No full index of MG).
I examined a number of the URLs for columns and was able deduce the pattern, and wrote a perl script that loaded each page (CURL function) and "scraped" the TITLE from the HTML output.
I found that their titles differed somewhat from mine (which was to be expected...) BUT their titles were wrong too, in places. So, we had no definitive list of exact titles, and I have not spent the time to manual compare.
A few of my shortened titles may remain. [Life is too short!]
On October 8th, 2014, certain fields were copied over to Wikipedia, with attribution.
WikiP is good because many entries link to WikiP pages on the subject matter, which is Fabulous.
We (G4G) also had a copy of Dana Richards index, we called the ROSETTA STONE.
I SHOWED Graph of columns -> Chapters. (Coming here some day!)
G4G Cocktail list (G4G13 - 2018) (~20 names!) I red a few for laughs.
Brainteaser Random Order The Perfect Number Thoughts of Nothing Five Sailors and a Monkey in a coconut Newcomb’s Paradox, with a möbius twist Zeno’s Paradox - bet you can’t drink it all !