Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine
The Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine (sometimes called the Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine or MENACE) was a mechanical computer made from 304 matchboxes designed and built by artificial intelligence researcher Donald Michie in 1961.
Michie was honoured for his contribution to machine learning research, and was twice commissioned to program a MENACE simulation on an actual computer.
[1] Fifteen years later, he wanted to further display his mathematical and computational prowess with an early convolutional neural network.
[5] Michie undertook the task of collecting and defining each matchbox as a "fun project", later turned into a demonstration tool.
[11] After removing duplicate arrangements (ones that were simply rotations or mirror images of other configurations), MENACE used 304 permutations in its chart and thus that many matchboxes.
The first stage "Boxes" operated in five phases, each setting a definition and a precedent for the rules of the algorithm in relation to the game.
[12][17] To retrieve MENACE's choice of move, the opponent or operator located the matchbox that matched the current game state, or a rotation or mirror image of it.
[4] Then, the bead that had rolled into the point of the "V" shape at the front of the tray was the move MENACE had chosen to make.
[4] Its colour was then used as the position to play on, and, after accounting for any rotations or flips needed based on the chosen matchbox configuration's relation to the current grid, the O would be placed on that square.
[18] If the human player is familiar with the optimal strategy, and MENACE can quickly learn it, then the games will eventually only end in draws.
In Donald Michie's official tournament against MENACE in 1961[4] he used optimal strategy, and he and the computer began to draw consistently after twenty games.
[3] The reinforcement does not create a perfect standard of wins; the algorithm will draw random uncertain conclusions each time.
[4] Donald Michie's MENACE proved that a computer could learn from failure and success to become good at a task.
For example, the combination of how MENACE starts with equal numbers of types of beads in each matchbox, and how these are then selected at random, creates a learning behaviour similar to weight initialisation in modern artificial neural networks.
[21] After the resounding reception of MENACE, Michie was invited to the US Office of Naval Research, where he was commissioned to build a BOXES-running program for an IBM Computer for use at Stanford University.
[4] There have been multiple recreations of MENACE in more recent years, both in its original physical form and as a computer program.
[27][28] A copy of MENACE built by Scroggs was featured in the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures,[29][30] and in a 2023 episode of QI XL.
[32] In her 2023 book The Future, author Naomi Alderman includes a fictional lecture with a detailed overview of MENACE.
