The Nimatron

Here’s the first automated game ever made: the Nimatron. Making its first appearance at the 1940 New York World’s Fair, it pitted a human against a machine which made perfect moves. The _New York Times_ wrote about the “new electric robot 8 feet tall”, that it would “play a variation of an old Chinese game called ‘Nim’ with all comers.” Those who won – and about 100,000 played at the World’s Fair – would get a token stamped “Nim Champ”.

Nim was not from Ancient China — the legend that it was in fact bought into a sort of Orientalism that imagined the Far East as mysterious and otherworldly. But Nim does show up in a 16th-century Italian book of magic tricks and math puzzles, which is pretty durned neat. The rules to Nim are simple, but the way to win isn’t intuitive to most people. It goes like this: you and an opponent each have a pile of stones. You take turns moving stones from your “enemy’s” pile, and the one who takes the last stone wins. You always have to take at least one stone, and you only take stones from one pile at a time.

There is a way to calculate how to win, but the Nimatron occasionally allowed players to open, so those who figured out the moves were able to beat the robot.

The co-inventor of the Nimatron was a man named Edward Condon, who considered his electric game to be a failure, since soon after the ideas behind it became much more widely applied in various electronic and computing machines.

Condon himself became the assistant director of the Manhattan project, but quit within six weeks, because he found the ultra-secrecy of the project “morbidly depressing”. Here’s an alternative -universe idea: the Nimatron gets wildly popular but humans give up on developing nukes.