the mr. smith, jones and robinson puzzle was somehow solved by a computer program in the 70s. the designer was paul weston | ralf barkow scanned the drawing and added some more information.
weston worked on it at the bcl lab, aka heinz von foerster lab, in illinois, u. champagne. actually i am missing a reference to that and other works badly, when i read the paper efficient name disambiguation for large-scale databases, which gets highlighted by technews this week.
the core of this work is an algorithm, which should be able to

cluster together names that the system believes to be similar ... ...the system correctly identified authors 90.6 percent of the time, when tested on 3,355 academic papers written by 490 different researchers.