Thank you for the comprehensive reply!
> 1. Is the finprims document representative of the gismu-making process
> described in CLL and/or the "1987 gismu-remaking" process? Or were
> these separate efforts?
yes, "and", not separate, though a few words were added later than 1987
using later weights
Does finprims include these later gismu?
I'm making a guess based on 25 year old memories, but I think we were
using integer arithmetic because it ran too slow otherwise (my brother
in law eventually recoded the inside loop in assembler, which sped
things up by an order of magnitude, but it was still incredibly slow by
today's standards, 5-100 minutes per source-word trial.)
Great detail. Do you happen to remember what kind of computer/CPU you used?
The actual weights from the final version of the program were
Weight[1] := 67; { Chinese }
Weight[2] := 36; { English }
Weight[3] := 33; { Spanish }
Weight[4] := 25; { Hindi }
Weight[5] := 24; { Russian }
Weight[6] := 15; { Arabic }
The use of integer arithmetic and halving before summing is one possible way these weights could have yielded 98.
Update: I have two "final" versions of the program, in source and
executable, but cannot recall what the difference is. The first was
almost certainly used for all the 1987 prim runs, while we may have used
the second one for the words added later.
I also think I have the full set of outputs of the data runs, which
gives the numbers that eventually went into finprims. (There were a
couple of intermediate steps - finprims was generated by me manually
after all the word runs were made, and I had picked the "winners".)
If you are willing to wade into the old Turbo-Pascal code, I may be able
to find it and send it to you.
If you have a chance to send the pascal code, and/or the outputs, I would be very interested to see them. Is your brother-in-law's assembly code archived with all of this?
mi'e la mukti mu'o