Short game

For those of you (of a certain age) who remember the pioneering days of 8 bit computing and machines like the Sinclair (whatever happened to him?) ZX80, 81 and Spectrum as well as the BBC Micro and Acorn Atom etc. You will probably recognise the screenshot above as a scene from the groundbreaking game "The Hobbit". It was a text based adventure game where players had to navigate their way through a series of puzzles trying to find the golden ring while avoiding the dragon. It was ground breaking because it attempted to do a reasonable job of natural language processing, i.e. understanding the intent of the instructions typed by the player. Of course it was really simple, and pretty limited (after all it ran on machines with tiny amounts of memory and processing power) and had a very limited vocabulary. I loved this game and via a number of twists and turns and in later life ended up building a software company based upon (among other things) natural language processing, suffice to say, these days we have comparatively infinite resources within which to work and many more techniques to bring to bear on the problem, but it remains a difficult thing to do well. Anyway, as you can see from the image I've brought the story line up to date to reflect our current predicament and for those that know the game you'll understand the command and the response, i.e. a pretty short game!