A strange little side quest
Between one round of Wisdom and Madness of Crowds and the next, this is worth knowing: Arthur Wynne published a diamond-shaped 'Word-Cross' in the New York World on December 21, 1913; the name later shifted to 'Cross-Word' and then 'crossword'. The same trail leads to another fact: Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. That gives Wisdom and Madness of Crowds a little more company than it first appears to have.
