My stepdad, who passed away many years ago, was not very expressive and hard to get to know. He was also ridiculously competitive, to the point that he wouldn't even let a child win at a dice game. I eventually got to know him better, and I even spoke at his funeral, but it was touch and go with him for a while. This is a story I would have told at his funeral, had I remembered it, in the moment.
In his work, he was some kind of chemical engineer. He worked with technology, knew his way around computers, could even program some basic things, but not a software expert. By the time I started to get to know him, I was already learning to program a bit myself, and I thought perhaps I knew computers better than he did. (I've been a software engineer for a few decades now, so it's certainly true now, but not when I was 10.)
One time, I wrote a commodore 64 game and invited him to play it, I think so I could show off how good I was at computers. I had struggled to figure out how to use a random number generator in C64 basic, but he told me how they worked, and I used the idea in the game I wrote.
I no longer remember the rules of the game, but it had something to do with predicting what the next dice roll would be.[*] Maybe the person who gets it closest wins, or something. The point for me wasn't to win, but just to show that I could write such a game on my own. Maybe it was to make myself feel smart. Maybe it was to make him respect me more.
[*] (After chewing on this for a while, I think I do actually remember how the game worked. It secretly rolled a number, and then it prompted you for each player's guess, one at a time. The further you were off from the number, the more points you got. When a player's score exceeds a threshhold--let's say 20 points--that player loses and the other player wins. So the more error in your guesses, the faster you lose--and if you are guessing exactly, you can't lose.)
He came in and sat down on the floor in my room, and we started playing. We played a few games, he said "Neat," or something, then said he'd be back to play more later. He got up and left. I stayed and tinkered some more.
A few hours later, he came back and asked if we could play again. I thought it was weird, because even I didn't think the game was very fun and that wasn't the point--but I said sure, and we played again. We split a couple of games. Then, he started winning. Guessing the number exactly, every single time, like 8 games in a row. He was smiling--something he did rarely--and his physical agitation was evident: He was sitting bolt upright on the floor, holding his knees, concentrating but also for some reason having a great time.
Finally, I called him on it. I knew enough math to know that this was fantastically unlikely, but he insisted no, he's just really good at the game. Eventually I just stopped playing and he said "Good games," and left the room.
Twenty minutes later my mom came into the room. She handed me a sheet of paper she got from him. ''HE CHEATED!"
It was a sheet of about a hundred numbers: They were dice rolls, in the range that my game used. I immediately spotted a section where the numbers were the same ones he had just guessed correctly. Further down the page, I saw the same sequence beginning again. I had no idea what the hell was happening.
He came in and explained it to me: how random number generators worked, the fact that they repeat, and--crucially--the fact that this PRNG had an EXTREMELY short period. So short that he was able to print out the entire sequence between repeats. And then he Memorized. The. Entire. Sequence. In an hour or two.
To win at a dice game with a child.
I've never respected him more than that moment.
