Help refresh my RAM

[WhiteCube]

Can someone help me remember something?

It was a book, the kind of book where a mathematician or computer scientist describes curious and interesting topics, like cellular automata and Penrose tiling.

It described a board game program, for chess or checkers or tic-tac-toe, one of the common ones.

But instead of a normal program, the author described how it could be done with matchboxes containing coloured beads, and a few simple rules.

Or maybe it wasn't a board game.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

 

[VBService]

You're likely thinking of the "Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine" (MENACE), described by mathematician and computer scientist Donald Michie.

Check out these books they are on a similar topic (IMO):

• The Pattern on the Stone by Danny Hillis
• Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

 

[WhiteCube]

Thanks VB! That's exactly what I was after. I had a strong feeling that is wasn't chess.

I've read GEB, a good book, it got me interested in programs that print their own source code.

 

[WhiteCube]

I was planning to train my implementation of MENACE with a random player, but the first time I ran it, I realised why that isn't going to work.

Bad moves are just as likely to be rewarded as they are to be punished.

I'm certainly not going to play it myself, so I had to write a perfect player.

MENACE plays "not stupidly" at the moment, and does okay against random moves. It draws half the time against a good player, but that should be all the time.

I may have missed something in the wikipedia article. This kind of program is not easy to debug. The matchbox data is eye-wateringly meaningless to a casual observer.

 

[WhiteCube]

I got it working, I had to write an expert player and a beginner player.

It takes about 650 games until menace plays like the training program would play against itself.

A bit more than I expected, but still an interesting demonstration of a system that learns.