Good Move, Monty

Experts said computer Scrabble couldn't be done, but programmers from the Iowa cornfields have packaged a fast-thinking, tough-minded, hand-held little player named Monty, who is stacking up big-dollar bonus points.

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In some aspects of technology, it is not so much what the dog has to say, but that the dog speaks at all. The fact that a microcomputer can play even a feeble round of Scrabble is remarkable enough, given the complexity of the popular crossword game. To be sure, for some time now machines that appear to think have beaten all but the grandest of chess masters, but in many ways chess is less of a programming challenge. For example, there are 225 squares on a Scrabble Brand Crossword Game, versus 64 in chess. A Scrabble program has to keep track of 100 pieces whose values can vary depending on where they are placed on the board, as opposed to only 32 chessmen with six fixed values. A chess player is used to waiting 10 minutes or longer for an opponent to move; few serious Scrabblists possess such patience; thus a computer ought to respond in 2 or 3 minutes. A Scrabble-playing device must also examine bonus-point opportunities, review the combinations of the seven letters in its rack, decide what letters to use for the game's blanks, randomly pick new tiles, monitor the remaining available letters, total up the score of individual moves, and keep a running score of the contestants. At the same time, to make itself a tough opponent, it has to contain and be able to refer to a vocabulary even more extensive than that of an articulate adult.

Indeed, the frustrating permutations involved in Scrabble that can produce mayhem among human competitors also led Byte magazine to conclude in late 1981 that, given the present limitations of speed and memory in microcomputer technology, a legitimate Scrabble program was pretty near impossible.

Certainly it would not be the first time in the annals of invention that the concept of a technical advance was being dismissed on one side of the street while some iconoclastic scientist was putting together a working model across the way. Sure enough, squeezed into an obscure corner of Chicago's Consumer Electronics Show this past June was the fruit of three years' research and development: a hand-held computer only 10 1/4-inches long, playing -- and shamelessly beating -- an expert Homo sapiens. The electronic instrument (its maker had named it Monty to give it product recognition) may not have been the biggest hit of the sprawling show, but his ability to speak at all earned the little fellow mention in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times; a passing IBM programmer, appreciating the feat of technology, became an investor; and an admiring Nolan Bushnell, grandee of gadgeteers, was heard to comment, "They're going to make lots of money." If so, then for the two founders and early-to-join R&D people who cranked up tiny Ritam Corp. in equally tiny Fairfield, Iowa, the abstemious years at $3,000 salaries will have been worth it.

Although a state slogan proclaims "Iowa -- a place to grow," it may seem curious that sophisticated technology is sprouting in the middle of cornfields. But Fairfield, seat of Maharishi International University, is a mecca of Transcendental Meditation (it is claimed that there are more TMers there than in any other place in the country). Not a few computer programmers and engineers -- including several of the dozen who were at Ritam at the beginning of this year -- are drawn to the clarity of mind and creative energies that TM is said to evoke.

And, as Bushnell predicts, it looks like Ritam is going to make a triple-word score. With only the prototype to show, Ritam's Monty Plays Scrabble already has been selected for inclusion in the American Express Christmas catalog and the JS&A catalog (whose creator, Joe Sugarman, is well known for an uncanny ability to pick hot mail-order gadgets). Four thousand units have been sold to Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and 6,000 to Bloomingdale's, which had to get the approval of the chairman of the board for so large an order. I. Magnin & Co. and Bullock's have ordered it on the West Coast. For Ritam ("intuition" in Sanskrit), any one of these retailers can lead to nirvana. The American Express catalog alone, for instance, has a circulation of some 3.5 million, with a "key" price (the average amount of an individual order) of close to $150 -- handily, at $149.95, Monty's retail cost.

But Ritam's breathless rush to success (the company is predicting sales of over 100,000 units in calendar 1983, for revenues close to $10 million and pretax profits of $3 million) cannot be credited to the usual convoluted business plans, exploitation of marketing niches, and large infusions of venture capital. Rather, it will have come about more from old-fashioned doggedness than anything else, a rarity in technology these days.

Ritam's president, Robert J. Walls, 33, a chemical engineer by college education and a programmer by self-teaching, started laying out an attack on Monty in June 1980, together with cofounder and vice-president Jonathan P. Isbit, 33, a trained microcomputer programmer. They were joined later by another programmer, C. David Matt, 30. Before that, Walls had been absorbed by board games because, as an only child growing up in Detroit (he later went to Fairfield to become a professor of business at MIU), he played a lot of them with what had to be one of the most patient fathers in the nation. As sort of a gift to other only children, Walls decided to program electronic players of family games And why not tackle thel biggest first? Within a few months of its founding in 1979, Ritam had a crude floppy-disk version of Monopoly, the world's best-selling proprietary board game, running on the company's sole asset, an Apple computer. The computer rolled the dice, put up houses and hotels, and bartered with players for property. It also found a way to steer around the licensing problem: Parker Bros.'s board was used to lay out the flow of the game; Monty participated strictly as a player. The Apple performed well enough to attract the attention of another Transcendental Meditationist, Rogers Badgett Jr., a then-36-year-old teacher of finance at the nearby university. Badgett, who had made considerable gains in the stock market through the exercise of TM business principles, put $17,500 into Ritam's near-empty coffers -- an exemplary case of finance in itself, since the stock he then acquired is now estimated to be worth some 21 times that sum (and likely far exceeds the rate of appreciation of Rogers Badgett Sr.'s investment in the Boston Red Sox).

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