Games Calculators Play

Pocket calculators, designed originally to assist accountants and engineers, are rapidly becoming everyman's instant genie. Worldwide sales of these minicomputers are expected to top 13 million this year and are growing in the U.S. alone at the rate of 400% annually. As prices drop (one model was selling for only $22 last week), consumers are snapping them up to check cost-per-unit prices at the supermarket, balance checkbooks, figure out tax returns and do their schoolwork. But all work and no play makes even a calculator a dull gimmick, and now the little machines can be used as electronic Merlins.

The extracurricular role of calculators emerged as mathematically minded users found that the versatile devices could be used to play sleight-of-button games and spell words. Because on most calculators, the glowing digits of the readout screen, when inverted, look more or less like letters of the alphabet,* the calculator owner can use the machine to compose more than 100 words and endless riddles. For example, to get the calculator to devise words suggestive of the energy crisis: put 42.46407 into the machine, divide by 3 and multiply by 5. Upside down the machine spells ShELL OIL (the floating decimal separates the words). Faced with a parking ticket, the calculator owner can come up with Oh hELLS BELLS. To greet a friend, you divide 98 by 7 to get hl. A greater challenge is to ask friends what a golf duffer and the movie Casablanca have in common. If you punch 2572, add 87 and multiply by 12, and then hold the machine upside down, it will spell BOGIE.

These are not the only games calculators will play. They can perform mathematical magic acts undreamed of by their designers. An example: take a figure that is double your age. Add 5. Multiply by 50. Add the amount of change in your pocket, up to $1, and subtract the number of days in the year. Add 115. Divide by 100. The calculator will display two numbers to the left of the decimal point, two to the right, showing respectively your age and the correct amount of money.

Already it looks as if commedia della calculator will fast become a national craze. Says James Rogers, an editor of Scientific American magazine: "I went through the stage of saying 'I don't need one of these.' But once you get one, it's sheer bliss." To achieve BLISS, punch 441304, divide by 8 and add 15.

* Numbers used and letters they can make 0 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 O I Z E h S L B G

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