Is Ton Hospel really just a quantum computer running Perl NAN?
This has been the subject of intense speculation for years.
There are no known photos and as indicated by the
following exchange,
only one golfer has ever seen him in real life:
On Thu, 2 May 2002, Ton Hospel wrote:
>
> Jerome Quelin writes:
>
>> I begin to think that Ton is an alien. This makes me wonder: has an
+yone seen
>> Ton in real life? ;)
>>
> I have.
That's just what an alien _would_ say.
--
Stephen Turner, Cambridge, UK http://homepage.ntlworld.com/adelie/s
+tephen/
"This is Henman's 8th Wimbledon, and he's only lost 7 matches." BBC, 2
+/Jul/01
Or is there something inherently irrational or unfathomable
about the whole golfing process, and therefore the mindset
that excells at it? (And by extrapolation, something we'd
rather not know for fear of becoming too much like "them"?)
I've often felt the golfer's mindset could be a fertile
ground for study in the field of psychiatry. :-)
Seriously, my feeling is that being a brilliant Perl golfer
has more to do with personal qualities, such as intelligence,
resourcefulness, competitiveness, tenacity, and so on, than it has to do with
Perl knowledge. Indeed a
complete Perl beginner, Mickut from Finland,
performed so sensationally in TPR(0,3) that he's listed second
in
The Sand-Baggin' Hall of Shame (for persons calling
themselves Beginners while they are in fact driving
like hard-boiled veterans) at
`/anick's BoG.
After programming in Perl for just four hours, he began moving
past some veteran programmers with years of Perl experience!
I well remember autrijus making a brilliant debut at
Ton's tournament.
If you read Ton's post mortem, you will appreciate that he was
in no doubt back then that Autrijus was a very rare talent indeed.
After the tournament, I sent Autrijus a congratulatory email
and remember him replying that he only wished he could summon
up the same intensity for his other hacking projects.
So you see his recent scintillating PUGS coding frenzy
is nothing compared to what he is truly capable of. ;-)
Update: Another example can be found in The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part III) (2009),
where an experienced golfer but a PHP beginner (me :-), won a PHP golf competition.
