Its subject, Melvin Kaye,[1] is an exemplary "Real Programmer" whose subtle techniques fascinate his colleagues.
[6][7] In Nather's story, Kaye is portrayed as being prone to avoiding optimizing assemblers in favor of crafting code to take advantage of hardware quirks, for example taking advantage of the rotation of the LGP-30's drum memory to avoid writing delay loops into the code.
Kaye reluctantly acceded to the request, but to his own delight, he got the test wrong, and the switch would instead cause the program to win every time (and the user to lose).
Some technical details are known to be incorrect, including the location of an "Index" flag bit in the instruction word; Kaye's use of it presumably gave Nather the vital clue that a coding trick was being used.
[1] There is a photograph on the front page of that issue showing that first class of neophyte LGP-30 programmers and the instructors, including Mel Kaye.