Puzzling Out an 80s Puzzle Toy

[Ido Gendel] looks back a time in the 80s when kids would learn by answering the questions to quizzes on their “TOMY Teacher,” or, “Sears Quiz-A-Tron”. There’s a bit of a conundrum with this toy. How did it know which answers were correct. Chip memory of any kind wasn’t the kind of thing you’d sweep into the dust bin if you had extras like it is now; it was expensive.

To use the toy, the child would place the notebook in the plastic frame on the device. They’d open the page with the quiz they would like to take. Printed in the upper left hand corner were three colored squares. There was a matching set of colored buttons on the device. They’d press the corresponding buttons in order from top to bottom and then the machine would magically know which answers on the quiz were correct.

[Ido] wondered how the machine handled this information. Was there an internal table for all 27 possible codes? Did it generate the answer table somehow? He sat down with a spreadsheet filled with the notebook code on the left and the corresponding correct answers on the right. Next he stared at the numbers.

He eventually determined that there was a pattern. The machine was using the colored squares as the input for a function that determined what the answers were. A table would have only taken up 68 bytes, but with one 80s chip on board, sounds to play, and lights to switch on and off, the machine needed all the free space it could get.

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