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Someone apparently put the bit about Sneakers into the article because of a confusion with this Robert Abbott, who is not the game inventor.
The security consultant is Robert P. Abbott. If the game inventor is still checking in here, would you add your birthdate and/or middle name? That will help prevent someone else from re-introducing this error down the road. Besides, you owe me a favor after the damage that Ultima did to my undergraduate grade-point average. :) JamesMLane 02:49, 8 August 2005 (UTC
Though early in his life he worked as a computer programmer with the IBM 360 assembly language, in the 1950s Abbott turned to game design.
That sentence implies that IBM 360 assembly language predated the 1950s. The IBM 360 series didn't emerge into daylight until the late 1960s. All it needs is a little tinkering with the wording, but it would be better for someone familiar with the subject to take care of that. All I can do is point out this confusing phraseology. Floozybackloves ( talk) 14:49, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Robert Abbott sent the following information to me in an e-mail.
Abbott was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He began inventing games when he was fourteen and recruited his little sister, Margie, as a play tester. Abbott attended St. Louis Country Day School, went to Yale for two years, then attended the University of Colorado for another two years. According to Abbott, "being much too bright, I never graduated."[11] After dropping out of the University of Colorado, Abbott spent two more years living in Colorado. For reasons he still can’t explain, those two years were a period of intense creativity for him. During that time, he invented all of his card games, including his game Eleusis.
Abbott next moved to New York City, where he worked at various clerk jobs, until he had a life-changing experience: Martin Gardner wrote about Eleusis in his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. So—you’re probably saying—Abbott got his game in a magazine. How can that be a life-changing experience? To understand this, you have to know about the effect Gardner’s column had on the world of science and the world of games and puzzles.Wikipedia’s entry for Gardner explains some of this, but it can’t explain everything. Gardner’s effect on the game Eleusis and on Abbott is a good example of the importance of the Mathematical Games column.
Abbott had written a letter to Gardner to explain the rules to Eleusis. Gardner was intrigued by the game and he even saw more in Eleusis than the inventor had seen. Abbott’s letter had mentioned that the strategy for playing Eleusis was basically inductive reasoning, but Gardner took this further. He saw that the game as a whole could be a model for the Scientific Method. Gardner’s column on Eleusis appeared in the June 1959 Scientific American, and it generated a great deal of interest.
Abbott now realized that this was a good time to get more of his games published, so he put together four of his card games—Babel, Eleusis, Leopard and Construction—and made them into the book Four New Card Games, which he privately published in 1962. Abbott sold it by mail and it did fairly well, since it was mentioned in a few places. The book came to the attention of the publisher Sol Stein, who had Abbott expand his book to eight card games plus one chess variant that Abbott had invented, and which was referred to as Baroque chess. In 1963, this book was published by Stein’s firm, Stein and Day, as Abbott’s New Card Games. (In 1968 there was a paperback edition by Funk & Wagnalls.)
In 1963, Abbott was having some success in publishing, but he wasn’t really making much money, so he decided to go back to his hometown of St. Louis, where his brother-in-law, Bob Ellis, got him a job as a computer programmer at the Washington University Computer Research Laboratory. In 1965, Abbott moved back to New York, and for the next 20 years he continued to work as a programmer, mostly in IBM 360 assembly language.
Abbott continued his work with games, but he also became interested in a new form of puzzle that eventually became known as Logic Mazes. His first logic maze had been published in October 1962 in (where else!) Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American, but it wasn’t until later that Abbott realized a lot more could be done with this form of maze. Since then, Abbott has created various mazes, most of which appeared in the books SuperMazes and Mad Mazes.[9][10] In 2010, his Where are the Cows? maze was published by the Oxford University Press in the book Cows in the Maze.[15]
~~ Hi878 (Come shout at me!) 23:48, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
Why is this article under VG project? Only connection I see is that there is a video game version of Theseus and the Minotaur. Did Abbott program that version? -- Mika1h ( talk) 17:59, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
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Reviewing |
Reviewer: DeadlyAssassin ( talk • contribs • count) 08:22, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
Rate | Attribute | Review Comment |
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1. Well-written: | ||
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1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct. |
|
![]() |
1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation. |
|
2. Verifiable with no original research: | ||
![]() |
2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline. |
|
![]() |
2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose). | |
![]() |
2c. it contains no original research. |
|
3. Broad in its coverage: | ||
![]() |
3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic. |
|
![]() |
3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style). |
|
![]() |
4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each. | |
![]() |
5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute. | |
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio: | ||
![]() |
6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content. | |
![]() |
6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions. | |
![]() |
7. Overall assessment. | Given some of the points I've noted above, I would like to put the nomination on hold for a week to give you time to make some amendments. I think what you've got is a great start. |
It was my pleasure to review, it was quite an interesting article actually.
Good stuff. -- Deadly∀ssassin 07:16, 20 September 2011 (UTC)
Almost there! -- Deadly∀ssassin 09:19, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
The following content about some of Mr. Abbott's games was removed from this article as it was too much for an article about the man. I'm putting it here so that should articles be created about the games themselves in the future it is more prominently available. -- Deadly∀ssassin 09:15, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
References
MadMazes34-35
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).ANCGF&W121-138
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Ultima
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).MG1959
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).
![]() |
An image used in this article,
File:Traffic Maze.png, has been nominated for speedy deletion at
Wikimedia Commons for the following reason: Copyright violations
Don't panic; deletions can take a little longer at Commons than they do on Wikipedia. This gives you an opportunity to contest the deletion (although please review Commons guidelines before doing so). The best way to contest this form of deletion is by posting on the image talk page.
This notification is provided by a Bot -- CommonsNotificationBot ( talk) 01:28, 2 November 2011 (UTC) |
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![]() | Robert Abbott (game designer) has been listed as one of the Sports and recreation good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | The following Wikipedia contributor may be personally or professionally connected to the subject of this article. Relevant policies and guidelines may include
conflict of interest,
autobiography, and
neutral point of view.
|
![]() | The content of this article has been derived in whole or part from
quoted email. Permission has been received from the copyright holder to release this material under both the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license and the
GNU Free Documentation License. You may use either or both licenses. Evidence of this has been confirmed and stored by
VRT volunteers, under ticket number
2011060710020228. This template is used by approved volunteers dealing with the Wikimedia volunteer response team system (VRTS) after receipt of a clear statement of permission at permissions-en ![]() |
Someone apparently put the bit about Sneakers into the article because of a confusion with this Robert Abbott, who is not the game inventor.
The security consultant is Robert P. Abbott. If the game inventor is still checking in here, would you add your birthdate and/or middle name? That will help prevent someone else from re-introducing this error down the road. Besides, you owe me a favor after the damage that Ultima did to my undergraduate grade-point average. :) JamesMLane 02:49, 8 August 2005 (UTC
Though early in his life he worked as a computer programmer with the IBM 360 assembly language, in the 1950s Abbott turned to game design.
That sentence implies that IBM 360 assembly language predated the 1950s. The IBM 360 series didn't emerge into daylight until the late 1960s. All it needs is a little tinkering with the wording, but it would be better for someone familiar with the subject to take care of that. All I can do is point out this confusing phraseology. Floozybackloves ( talk) 14:49, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Robert Abbott sent the following information to me in an e-mail.
Abbott was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He began inventing games when he was fourteen and recruited his little sister, Margie, as a play tester. Abbott attended St. Louis Country Day School, went to Yale for two years, then attended the University of Colorado for another two years. According to Abbott, "being much too bright, I never graduated."[11] After dropping out of the University of Colorado, Abbott spent two more years living in Colorado. For reasons he still can’t explain, those two years were a period of intense creativity for him. During that time, he invented all of his card games, including his game Eleusis.
Abbott next moved to New York City, where he worked at various clerk jobs, until he had a life-changing experience: Martin Gardner wrote about Eleusis in his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. So—you’re probably saying—Abbott got his game in a magazine. How can that be a life-changing experience? To understand this, you have to know about the effect Gardner’s column had on the world of science and the world of games and puzzles.Wikipedia’s entry for Gardner explains some of this, but it can’t explain everything. Gardner’s effect on the game Eleusis and on Abbott is a good example of the importance of the Mathematical Games column.
Abbott had written a letter to Gardner to explain the rules to Eleusis. Gardner was intrigued by the game and he even saw more in Eleusis than the inventor had seen. Abbott’s letter had mentioned that the strategy for playing Eleusis was basically inductive reasoning, but Gardner took this further. He saw that the game as a whole could be a model for the Scientific Method. Gardner’s column on Eleusis appeared in the June 1959 Scientific American, and it generated a great deal of interest.
Abbott now realized that this was a good time to get more of his games published, so he put together four of his card games—Babel, Eleusis, Leopard and Construction—and made them into the book Four New Card Games, which he privately published in 1962. Abbott sold it by mail and it did fairly well, since it was mentioned in a few places. The book came to the attention of the publisher Sol Stein, who had Abbott expand his book to eight card games plus one chess variant that Abbott had invented, and which was referred to as Baroque chess. In 1963, this book was published by Stein’s firm, Stein and Day, as Abbott’s New Card Games. (In 1968 there was a paperback edition by Funk & Wagnalls.)
In 1963, Abbott was having some success in publishing, but he wasn’t really making much money, so he decided to go back to his hometown of St. Louis, where his brother-in-law, Bob Ellis, got him a job as a computer programmer at the Washington University Computer Research Laboratory. In 1965, Abbott moved back to New York, and for the next 20 years he continued to work as a programmer, mostly in IBM 360 assembly language.
Abbott continued his work with games, but he also became interested in a new form of puzzle that eventually became known as Logic Mazes. His first logic maze had been published in October 1962 in (where else!) Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American, but it wasn’t until later that Abbott realized a lot more could be done with this form of maze. Since then, Abbott has created various mazes, most of which appeared in the books SuperMazes and Mad Mazes.[9][10] In 2010, his Where are the Cows? maze was published by the Oxford University Press in the book Cows in the Maze.[15]
~~ Hi878 (Come shout at me!) 23:48, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
Why is this article under VG project? Only connection I see is that there is a video game version of Theseus and the Minotaur. Did Abbott program that version? -- Mika1h ( talk) 17:59, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: DeadlyAssassin ( talk • contribs • count) 08:22, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
Rate | Attribute | Review Comment |
---|---|---|
1. Well-written: | ||
![]() |
1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct. |
|
![]() |
1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation. |
|
2. Verifiable with no original research: | ||
![]() |
2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline. |
|
![]() |
2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose). | |
![]() |
2c. it contains no original research. |
|
3. Broad in its coverage: | ||
![]() |
3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic. |
|
![]() |
3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style). |
|
![]() |
4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each. | |
![]() |
5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute. | |
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio: | ||
![]() |
6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content. | |
![]() |
6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions. | |
![]() |
7. Overall assessment. | Given some of the points I've noted above, I would like to put the nomination on hold for a week to give you time to make some amendments. I think what you've got is a great start. |
It was my pleasure to review, it was quite an interesting article actually.
Good stuff. -- Deadly∀ssassin 07:16, 20 September 2011 (UTC)
Almost there! -- Deadly∀ssassin 09:19, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
The following content about some of Mr. Abbott's games was removed from this article as it was too much for an article about the man. I'm putting it here so that should articles be created about the games themselves in the future it is more prominently available. -- Deadly∀ssassin 09:15, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
References
MadMazes34-35
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).ANCGF&W121-138
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Ultima
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).MG1959
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).
![]() |
An image used in this article,
File:Traffic Maze.png, has been nominated for speedy deletion at
Wikimedia Commons for the following reason: Copyright violations
Don't panic; deletions can take a little longer at Commons than they do on Wikipedia. This gives you an opportunity to contest the deletion (although please review Commons guidelines before doing so). The best way to contest this form of deletion is by posting on the image talk page.
This notification is provided by a Bot -- CommonsNotificationBot ( talk) 01:28, 2 November 2011 (UTC) |
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Robert Abbott (game designer). Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 21:53, 14 December 2017 (UTC)