Bertie the Brain

A December 1956 cover feature article in Radio-Electronics magazine describes "Relay Moe" which plays tic tac toe with adjustable levels of skill. It used 90 relays.

<https://www.vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/Radio%20Electronics%...>

Here is the full text, for discussing with agents:

https://archive.org/stream/RadioElectronics195701/Radio%20El...

This is a subject dear to my heart. I'm a mathematician who routinely uses symmetry in counting problems. As a kid I remember writing out a tic tac toe game tree in about ten pages. I must have used symmetry, and I must have only mapped a winning strategy, not all 765 game states up to symmetry.

So my first reaction to now reading that Bertie the Brain used "addition tubes" was "Really? Can't you do that with relays?" And the reality is that Bertie the Brain was a solution looking for a problem, a demo project for these tubes, not an attempt at the simplest way to implement such a machine.

Still, looking at the numbers, I'm impressed that Relay Moe managed multiple levels of game play using only 90 relays. The design exploited symmetry.

On the tic tac toe topic, MENACE is just startlingly cool:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

The article says this was for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition, and it appears that a high-schooler Donald Knuth got to see one such machine in Chicago (possibly on a school trip; he grew up in Milwaukee) long before his first encounter with a computer, as documented in TAOCP vol 4A:

> This setup is based on an exhibit from the early 1950s at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where the author was first introduced to the magic of switching circuits. The machine in Chicago, designed by researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, allowed me to go first; yet I soon discovered there was no way to defeat it. Therefore I decided to move as stupidly as possible, hoping that the designers had not anticipated such bizarre behavior. In fact I allowed the machine to reach a position where it had two winning moves; and it seized both of them! Moving twice is of course a flagrant violation of the rules, so I had won a moral victory even though the machine had announced that I had lost.

Later, a program for playing tic-tac-toe was one of the first programs he wrote, after he entered college and discovered computers. (He also quotes Charles Babbage! https://research.swtch.com/tictactoe)

2014 interview with the creator: https://spacing.ca/toronto/2014/08/13/meet-bertie-brain-worl...

the mechanical chess computer was even more impressive imho

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista

early 1900s, that's incredible

the first electronic computer playing chess was almost 50 years away

SF author Fred Saberhagen used an "automated" tic-tac-toe in one of the first Berserker (intelligent machines bent on wiping out organic life) stories.

The protagonist was a scout spaceship pilot, who for plot reasons had to simulate being alert in communication with a Berserker that could kill him if it determined he wasn't.

If memory serves, he devised some sort of branch elimination algorithm using matchsticks, so that his tic-tac-toe games improved with iteration...

That was 1963: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series)

I miss the days when video games were used to showcase technical advances.

"Kates built the game to showcase his additron tube, a miniature version of the vacuum tube, though the transistor overtook it in computer development shortly thereafter."

As I was reading through this, I came to the part that mentions the cathode-ray tube amusement device and the words instantly unlocked a long forgotten memory I had as a child reading DK illustrated books on science and tech (I can't recall what the book was called) and it's where I learnt about it being the first video game ever.

Only tangentially related to this article but it took me back!

Man Canada used to be so impressive. We need to get back there

So ... Joshua was the next evolution of Bertie?

Toronto leading AI since the 50s woo!