The Kodak Research Labs (like Bell Labs) let their researchers play. In the 1960's my father (who later devised the Bayer filter for digital cameras) coded this algorithm for "Jotto" the 5 letter word version of Mastermind.
Computers were so slow that one couldn't consider every word in the dictionary as a potential guess. He decided empirically on a sample size that played well enough.
I became a mathematician. From this childhood exposure, entropy was the first mathematical "concept" beyond arithmetic that I understood.
(I mention this so people will know the list exists, and hopefully email us more nominations when they see an unusually great and interesting comment, like this one.)
Any plans for the HN API to expose highlights? It's a neat high signal collection that I have some custom bit of code that translates it into an RSS feed but an official endpoint would be neat :)
Computers were so slow that one couldn't consider every word in the dictionary as a potential guess. He decided empirically on a sample size that played well enough.
I became a mathematician. From this childhood exposure, entropy was the first mathematical "concept" beyond arithmetic that I understood.