6 ms·
A Matchbox Game-Learning Machine (1991) [pdf]
- 082349872349872 4y ago(1961)
- fho 4y agoPossible, the file is tagged 1991. Could be a scan from a 1991 revision of the 1961 book?
- matjet 4y agoWhile 1991 does seem too recent for the text, 1961 is not possible given it makes several references to later years, up to 1965/1968. I am curious if this article has been scanned by a machine that attempts to use OCR to improve quality - at the expense of occasional mistakes. "dress" in place of "chess" looks close in font appearance, but far to mistype on a keyboard.
- SamBam 4y agoAre you referring to "(so goes an old joke in modern dress)"? I'm pretty certain that is intentional. It's an old joke that has dressed up modern.
- iconjack 4y agoI'm pretty sure this first appeared in Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in the March 1962 issue of Scientific American. Gardner later collected some of his columns and published them in books, which is what you see in this HN submission. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24937263 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24937263
- julian55 4y agoI remember reading about Matchbox Game-Learning Machines in a book in my school library in the late 1960s. It was partly responsible for getting me interested in computers.
- 082349872349872 4y agoSimilar, but for me it was Saberhagen, Without a Thought (1963). (worth a reread now that the Newts of today are seeking to harness LLMs ... but do we have a Del?)
- defrost 4y agoThis is the one .. Saberhagen knew of Donald Michie's [1] MENACE [2] .. and this linked article tells of matchbox driven noughts and crosses engines and other variations for similarly simple games. This was recently broadcast with discussion on the UK panel show QI (Quite Interesting) which may point to why this has hit the HN zeitgeist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Michie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Michie [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_Crosses_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...
- stefncb 4y agoMaking an equivalent of this was one of my first ever projects when I started learning programming. I'd read about it recently and was amazed when it actually started beating me every time.
- mysterydip 4y agoReally interesting! I wonder if there's an implementation someone's done on the web for this.
- jimktrains2 4y agoStand up maths did an episode on a similar "machine" called MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine) that learns to play tick tac toe. https://youtu.be/R9c-_neaxeU https://youtu.be/R9c-_neaxeU The video description has additional links to resources: https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/19 https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/19 http://chalkdustmagazine.com/tag/menace/ http://chalkdustmagazine.com/tag/menace/
- jmmcd 4y agoThis article is mostly about MENACE.
- ravi-delia 4y agoIt's mostly about HER, but does have a blurb about MENACE at the beginning
- blacklion 4y agoGardner, chapter 8? I've built one in my childhood. Fortunately, most of Gardner's books were translated to my language and my father bought all of them. I've re-read these books maybe 10 times each.
- exebook 4y agoWhat was your language? I read two of his books when I was a kid in Russian. Also built the matchbox machine but I think it was playing hexapawn which was too simplistic compared to tic tac toe and a bit disappointing. I couldn't find enough beads and had to use cut matches and pieces of paper as well. And it was quite a story to convince adults to buy me so many matchboxes, I think it was 21. I think this machine and Conway's Life also explained in that book have transformed me.
- blacklion 4y agoRussian, yes. It is miracle, that these USA books were translated in USSR, IMHO. All these brain-teasers, and, yes, of course, Game of Life! I didn't have any beads, but I had about 1m of 100 pairs telco cable, so I've used small pieces of wire in colored insulation as beads :-)
- Pamar 4y agoI could write the same comment - except that I did not really build the machine (also, I am Italian)...
- vmilner 4y agoI made one of these in 1985 on my parents dining table. I had no idea Martin Gardners books were laying the ground for a maths science career. Those books (picked up at random from the public library) were the Numberphile (etc) videos of the 80s - particularly for kids whose family had no science background.
- angry_moose 4y agoThere's a version of MENACE online that you can train from scratch: https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/menace/ https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/menace/ Around the 50th game it starts drawing pretty consistently.
- pinewurst 4y agoDon't forget Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas Ryan too. Matchboxes to bootstrap a full AI.
- ja27 4y agoYes - I keep a copy of the Martin Gardner Scientific American article (which this link appears to be a re-print of) inside my copy of The Adolescence of P-1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adolescence_of_P-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adolescence_of_P-1
- viscousviolin 4y agoSeems like this is what Matt Parker built together with some other people a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU&ab_channel=Stand-upMaths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU&ab_channel=Stand.... It's incredibly inefficient compared to running it on a computer, but an amazing way to teach kids about this.