Space Hobo<p>I've been tinkering with ways to squeeze slightly more modern <a href="https://teh.entar.net/tags/InteractiveFiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>InteractiveFiction</span></a> onto a <a href="https://teh.entar.net/tags/PDP8" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PDP8</span></a> over the past year or two. I was playing with the dictionary from the <a href="https://teh.entar.net/tags/Hibernated" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Hibernated</span></a> 1 Director's Cut, which has about 650 entries, and managed to come up with a system that distinguishes all but 55 of those uniquely, and those 55 are lumped into 16 buckets. </p><p> Not a bad collision rate, especially given the side-effects of my scheme are less surprising to human players than some other approaches!</p><p>The only drawback is that it can't distinguish the diagonal directions well, but with careful command choices and some workarounds in special cases we can avoid this and still have a fairly plush-feeling vocabulary. Now I just need to work on the rest of it to see if it was worth the brainwave!</p>