

I’ve had a copy for a long time, and I dust it off to try playing it every year or so. My Japanese reading skill is improving very slowly, so each time I make a little more progress before giving up.
It feels super interesting in a surreal, David Lynch/Haruki Murakami/Garage way.





I presume that the code was tested for various cases where there was at least one previous password on record, but everyone forgot about new users with no previous passwords. However I’m having trouble imagining what the code could actually be doing.
I can only imagine a dynamically typed language, and a “checkedPasswords” variable being declared but uninitialized, then a loop incrementing that variable for each non-similar password pulled from the records, and finally a check to see if checkedPasswords equals the number of stored previous passwords.
The execution environment could type and initialize the variable by default after the first increment, but in the case of the user having no previous passwords on record that wouldn’t happen, and the final equivalency check would be comparing an integer to some internal “NaN” state, thus failing.