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MENACE at Manchester Science Festival

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2022-07-31

Interesting.
Could try a same kind of thing using playing card deck(s)? A(=1)-2-3 4-5-6 7-8-9 maybe 3 decks with different colours on their backs.

Willem

2022-06-22

this if great!

Djonwaw

2022-02-27

I also read the Martin Gardner article way back when and had two matchbox machines (actually with envelopes instead of matchboxes) play Nim against each other. I don't remember all the details now, except that it got to the point where one would make the first move and the other would immediately resign.

Tim Lewis

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⭐ top comment (2022-02-26) ⭐

I made a matchbox machine that learns to play 3x3 Nim almost 50 years ago. I still have it. (Based on Martin Gardner's article)

Tony

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Visualising MENACE's learning

2019-12-27

In tonight's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, Hannah Fry and Matt Parker demonstrated how machine learning works using MENACE.

The copy of MENACE that appeared in the lecture was build and trained by me. During the training, I logged all the moved made by MENACE and the humans playing against them, and using this data I have created some visualisations of the machine's learning.

First up, here's a visualisation of the likelihood of MENACE choosing different moves as they play games. The thickness of each arrow represented the number of beads in the box corresponding to that move, so thicker arrows represent more likely moves.

The likelihood that MENACE will play each move.

There's an awful lot of arrows in this diagram, so it's clearer if we just visualise a few boxes. This animation shows how the number of beads in the first box changes over time.

The beads in the first box.

You can see that MENACE learnt that they should always play in the centre first, an ends up with a large number of green beads and almost none of the other colours. The following animations show the number of beads changing in some other boxes.

MENACE learns that the top left is a good move.

MENACE learns that the middle right is a good move.

MENACE is very likely to draw from this position so learns that almost all the possible moves are good moves.

The numbers in these change less often, as they are not used in every game: they are only used when the game reached the positions shown on the boxes.

We can visualise MENACE's learning progress by plotting how the number of beads in the first box changes over time.

The number of beads in MENACE's first box.

Alternatively, we could plot how the number of wins, loses and draws changes over time or view this as an animated bar chart.

The number of games MENACE wins, loses and draws.

The number of games MENACE has won, lost and drawn.

If you have any ideas for other interesting ways to present this data, let me know in the comments below.

Tags: menace, machine learning, games, programming, martin gardner, noughts and crosses, royal institution, matt parker, hannah fry, data, data visualisation

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MENACE at Manchester Science Festival

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2020-01-07

@(anonymous): Have you been refreshing the page? Every time you refresh it resets MENACE to before it has learnt anything.

It takes around 80 games for MENACE to learn against the perfect AI. So it could be you've not left it playing for long enough? (Try turning the speed up to watch MENACE get better.)

Matthew

2020-01-07

I have played around menace a bit and frankly it doesnt seem to be learning i occasionally play with it and it draws but againt the perfect ai you dont see as many draws, the perfect ai wins alot more

(anonymous)

2020-01-03

@Colin: You can set MENACE playing against MENACE2 (MENACE that plays second) on the interactive MENACE. MENACE2's starting numbers of beads and incentives may need some tweaking to give it a chance though; I've been meaning to look into this in more detail at some point...

Matthew

2019-12-31

Idle pondering (and something you may have covered elsewhere): what's the evolution as MENACE plays against itself? (Assuming MENACE can play both sides.)

Colin

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MENACE in fiction

2018-12-16

By now, you've probably noticed that I like teaching matchboxes to play noughts and crosses. Thanks to comments on Hacker News, I discovered that I'm not the only one: MENACE has appeared in, or inspired, a few works of fiction.

The Adolescence of P-1

The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J Ryan [1] is the story of Gregory Burgess, a computer programmer who writes a computer program that becomes sentient. P-1, the program in question, then gets a bit murdery as it tries to prevent humans from deactivating it.

The first hint of MENACE in this book comes early on, in chapter 2, when Gregory's friend Mike says to him:

"Because I'm a veritable fount of information. From me you could learn such wonders as the gestation period of an elephant or how to teach a matchbox to win at tic-tac-toe."

Taken from The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J Ryan [1], page 27

A few years later, in chapter 4, Gregory is talking to Mike again. Gregory asks:

"... How do you teach a matchbox to play tic-tac toe?"

"What?"

"You heard me. I remember you once said you could teach a matchbox. How?"

"Jesus Christ! Let me think . . . Yeah . . . I remember now. That was an article in Scientific American quite a few years ago. It was a couple of years old when I mentioned it to you, I think."

"How does it work?"

"Pretty good. Same principal of reward and punishment you use to teach a dog tricks, as I remember. Actually, you get several matchboxes. One for each possible move you might make in a game of tic-tac-toe. You label them appropriately, then you put an equal number of two different coloured beads in each box. The beads correspond to each yes/no decision you can make in a game. When a situation is reached, you grab the box for the move, shake it up, and grab a bead out of it. The bead indicates the move. You make a record of that box and color, and then make the opposing move yourself. You move against the boxes. If the boxes lose the game, you subtract a bead of the color you used from each of the boxes you used. If they win, you add a bead of the appropriate color to the boxes you used. The boxes lose quite a few games, theoretically, and after the bad moves start getting eliminated or statistically reduced to inoperative levels, they start to win. Then they never lose. Something like that. Check Scientific American about four years ago. How is this going to help you?"

Taken from The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J Ryan [1], pages 41-42

The article in Scientific American that they're talking about is obviously A matchbox game learning-machine by Martin Gardner [2]. Mike, unfortunately, hasn't quite remembered perfectly how MENACE works: rather than having two colours in each box for yes and no, each box actually has a different colour for each possible move that could be made next. But to be fair to Mike, he read the article around two years before this conversation so this error is forgivable.

In any case, this error didn't hold Gregory back, as he quickly proceeded to write a program, called P-1 inspired by MENACE. P-1 was first intended to learn to connect to other computers through their phone connections and take control of their supervisor, but then Gregory failed to close the code and it spent a few years learning everything it could before contacting Gregory, who was obviously a little surprised to hear from it.

P-1 has also learnt to fear, and is scared of being deactiviated. With Gregory's help, P-1 moves much of itself to a more secure location. Without telling Gregory, P-1 also attempts to get control of America's nuclear weapons to obtain its own nuclear deterrent, and starts using its control over computer systems across America to kill anyone that threatens it.

Apart from a few Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award worthy segments, The Adolescence of P-1 is an enjoyable read.

Hide and Seek (1984)

In 1984, The Adolescence of P-1 was made into a Canadian TV film called Hide and Seek [3]. It doesn't seem to have made it to DVD, but luckily the whole film is on YouTube. About 24 minutes into the film, Gregory explains to Jessica how he made P-1:

Gregory: First you end up with random patterns like this. Now there are certain rules: if a cell has one or two neighbours, it reproduces into the next generation. If it has no neighbours, it dies of loneliness. More than two it dies of overcrowding. Press the return key.

Jessica: Okay. [pause] And this is how you created P-1?

Gregory: Well, basically. I started to change the rules and then I noticed that the patterns looked like computer instructions. So I entered them as a program and it worked.

Hide and Seek [3] (1984)

This is a description of a cellular automaton similar to Game of Life, and not a great way to make a machine that learns. I guess the film's writers have worse memories than Gregory's friend Mike.

In fact, apart from the character names and the murderous machine, the plots of The Adolescence of P-1 and Hide and Seek don't have much in common. Hide and Seek does, however, have a lot of plot elements in common with WarGames [4].

WarGames (1983)

In 1983, the film WarGames was released. It is the story of David, a hacker that tries to hack into a video game company's computer, but accidentally hacks into the US governments computer and starts a game of Global thermonuclear war. At least David thinks it's a game, but actually the computer has other ideas, and does everything in its power to actually start a nuclear war.

During David's quests to find out more about the computer and prevent nuclear war, he learns about its creator, Stephen Falken. He describes him to his girlfriend, Jennifer:

David: He was into games as well as computers. He designed them so that they could play checkers or poker. Chess.

Jennifer: What's so great about that? Everybody's doing that now.

David: Oh, no, no. What he did was great! He designed his computer so it could learn from its own mistakes. So they'd be better they next time they played. The system actually learned how to learn. It could teach itself.

WarGames [4] (1983)

Although David doesn't explain how the computer learns, he at least states that it does learn, which is more than Gregory managed in Hide and Seek.

David finding Falken's maze: Teaching a machine to
learn by Stephen Falken

David's research into Stephen Falken included finding an article called Falken's maze: Teaching a machine to learn in June 1963's issue of Scientific American. This article and Stephen Falken are fictional, but perhaps its appearance in Scientific American is a subtle nod to Martin Gardner and A matchbox game learning-machine.

WarGames was a successful film: it was generally liked by viewers and nominated for three Academy Awards. It seems likely that the creators of Hide and Seek were really trying to make their own version of WarGames, rather than an accurate apatation of The Adolescence of P-1. This perhaps explains the similarities between the plots of the two films.

Without a Thought

Without a Thought by Fred Saberhagen [5] is a short story published in 1963. It appears in a collection of related short stories by Fred Saberhagen called Bezerker.

In the story, Del and his aiyan (a pet a bit like a more intelligent dog; imagine a cross between R2-D2 and Timber) called Newton are in a spaceship fighting against a bezerker. The bezerker has a mind weapon that pauses all intelligent thought, both human and machine. The weapon has no effect on Newton as Newton's thought is non-intelligent.

The bezerker challenges Del to a simplified checker game, and says that if Del can play the game while the mind weapon is active, then he will stop fighting.

After winning the battle, Del explains to his commander how he did it:

But the Commander was watching Del: "You got Newt to play by the following diagrams, I see that. But how could he learn the game?"

Del grinned. "He couldn't, but his toys could. Now wait before you slug me" He called the aiyan to him and took a small box from the animal's hand. The box rattled faintly as he held it up. On the cover was pasted a diagram of on possible position in the simplified checker game, with a different-coloured arrow indicating each possible move of Del's pieces.

It took a couple of hundred of these boxes," said Del. "This one was in the group that Newt examined for the fourth move. When he found a box with a diagram matching the position on the board, he picked the box up, pulled out one of these beads from inside, without looking – that was the hardest part to teach him in a hurry, by the way," said Del, demonstrating. "Ah, this one's blue. That means, make the move indicated on the cover by the blue arrow. Now the orange arrow leads to a poor position, see?" Del shook all the beads out of the box into his hand. "No orange beads left; there were six of each colour when we started. But every time Newton drew a bead, he had orders to leave it out of the box until the game was over. Then, if the scoreboard indicated a loss for our side, he went back and threw away all the beads he had used. All the bad moves were gradually eliminated. In a few hours, Newt and his boxes learned to play the game perfectly."

Taken from Without a Thought by Fred Saberhagen [5]

It's a good thing the checkers game was simplified, as otherwise the number of boxes needed to play would be way too big.

Overall, Without a Thought is a good short story containing an actually correctly explained machine learning algorithm. Good job Fred Saberhagen!

References

[1] The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J Ryan. 1977.

[2] A matchbox game learning-machine by Martin Gardner. Scientific American, March 1962. [link]

[3] Hide and Seek. 1984. [link]

[4] WarGames. 1993.

[5] Without a Thought by Fred Saberhagen. 1963.

Tags: menace, machine learning, games, martin gardner, noughts and crosses, books

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Building MENACEs for other games

2018-04-29

Two years ago, I built a copy of MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine). Since then, it's been to many Royal Institution masterclasses, visted Manchester and met David Attenborough. When I'm not showing them off, the 304 matchboxes that make up my copy of MENACE live in this box:

This box isn't very big, which might lead you to wonder how big MENACE-style machines would be for other games.

Hexapawn (HER)

In A matchbox game learning-machine by Martin Gardner [1], the game of Hexapawn was introduced. Hexapawn is played on a 3×3 grid, and starts with three pawns facing three pawns.

The pieces move like pawns: they may be either moved one square forwards into an empty square, or take another pawn diagonally (the pawns are not allowed to move forwards two spaces on their first move, as they can in chess). You win if one of your pawns reaches the other end of the board. You lose if none of your pieces can move.

The game was invented by Martin Gardner as a good game for his readers to build a MENACE-like machine to play against, as there are only 19 positions that can face player two, so only 19 matchboxes are needed to make HER (Hexapawn Educable Robot). (HER plays as player two, as if player two plays well they can always win.)

Nine Men's Morris (MEME)

In Nine Men's Morris, two players first take turns to place pieces on the board, before taking turns to move pieces to adjacent spaces. If three pieces are placed in a row, a player may remove one of the opponent's pieces. It's a bit like Noughts and Crosses, but with a bit more chance of it not ending in a draw.

In Solving Nine Men's Morris by Ralph Gasser [2], the number of possible game states in Nine Men's Morris is given as approximately \(10^{10}\). To build MEME (Machine Educable Morris Engine), you would need this many matchboxes. These boxes would form a sphere with radius 41m: that's approximately the length of two tennis courts.

MEME: Machine Educable Morris Engine

As a nice bonus, if you build MEME, you'll also smash the world record for the largest matchbox collection.

Connect 4 (COFFIN)

In Symbolic classification of general two-player games by Stefan Edelkamp and Peter Kissmann [3], the number of possible game states in Connect 4 is given as 4,531,985,219,092. The boxes used to make COFFIN (COnnect Four Fighting INstrument) would make a sphere with radius 302m: approximately the height of the Eiffel Tower.

COFFIN: COnnect Four Fighting INstrument

Draughts/Checkers (DOCILE)

In Solving the game of Checkers by Jonathan Schaeffer and Robert Lake [4], the number of possible game states in Draughts is given as approximately \(5\times10^{20}\). The boxes needed to build DOCILE (Draughts Or Checkers Intelligent Learning Engine) would make a sphere with radius 151km.

OpenStreetMap

DOCILE: Draughts Or Checkers Intelligent Learning Engine

If the centre of DOCILE was in London, some of the boxes would be in Sheffield.

Chess (CLAWS)

The number of possible board positions in chess is estimated to be around \(10^{43}\). The matchboxes needed to make up CLAWS (Chess Learning And Winning System) would fill a sphere with radius \(4\times10^{12}\)m.

CLAWS: Chess Learning And Winning System

If the Sun was at the centre of CLAWS, you might have to travel past Uranus on your search for the right box.

Go (MEGA)

The number of possible positions in Go is estimated to be somewhere near \(10^{170}\). To build MEGA (Machine Educable Go Appliance), you're going to need enough matchboxes to make a sphere with radius \(8\times10^{54}\)m.

MEGA: Machine Educable Go Appliance

The observable universe takes up a tiny space at the centre of this sphere. In fact you could fit around \(10^{27}\) copies of the universe side by side along the radius of this sphere.

It's going to take you a long time to look through all those matchboxes to find the right one...

References

[1] A matchbox game learning-machine by Martin Gardner. Scientific American, March 1962. [link]

[2] Solving Nine Men's Morris by Ralph Gasser. Games of No Chance 29, 1996. [link]

[3] Symbolic classification of general two-player games by Stefan Edelkamp and Peter Kissmann. in Advances in Artificial Intelligence (edited by A.R. Dengel, K. Berns, T.M. Breuel, F. Bomarius, T.R. Roth-Berghofer), 2008. [link]

[4] Solving the game of Checkers by Jonathan Schaeffer and Robert Lake. Games of No Chance 29, 1996. [link]

Tags: menace, machine learning, games, programming, martin gardner, hexapawn, noughts and crosses, nine men's morris, draughts, chess, go, mathsjam

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MENACE in fiction

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Comments in green were written by me. Comments in blue were not written by me.

2022-07-31

Kind of like the "Blue Brain Project". They got a worm and fruitfly brain on the computer, I wanted to download the fruitfly brain for 2GB USB stick but it was over 12 TB. They uploaded half a mouse brain on their project so far.

Willem

2022-05-19

Would Love to play with Coffin/Coffin2. Do you have the code on git or a JS/web version?... been kind of thinking of coding a version that only makes the match boxes as it needs them (to save on memory) but I heard you already have a version with optimizations (and my coding skill is rough at best)

John

2020-09-19

Are you aware of any actual implementations of anything in matchboxes, games or otherwise?

Jam

⭐ top comment (2018-11-16) ⭐

Of course, to make CLAWS, you will have to leave a large gap in the centre of the matchbox sphere, to avoid the very real danger of fire. Furthermore, some redundancy is needed, to replace the boxes which will be damaged by the myriad hard objects which are whizzing around the solar system. For this latter reason alone, I propose that the machine would be impractical to make! ;-D

g0mrb

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MENACE: Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine

2015-08-27

In 1961, Donald Michie built MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), a machine capable of learning to be a better player of Noughts and Crosses (or Tic-Tac-Toe if you're American). As computers were less widely available at the time, MENACE was built from from 304 matchboxes.

Taken from Trial and error by Donald Michie [2]

The original MENACE.

To save you from the long task of building a copy of MENACE, I have written a JavaScript version of MENACE, which you can play against here.

How to play against MENACE

To reduce the number of matchboxes required to build it, MENACE always plays first. Each possible game position which MENACE could face is drawn on a matchbox. A range of coloured beads are placed in each box. Each colour corresponds to a possible move which MENACE could make from that position.

To make a move using MENACE, the box with the current board position must be found. The operator then shakes the box and opens it. MENACE plays in the position corresponding to the colour of the bead at the front of the box.

For example, in this game, the first matchbox is opened to reveal a red bead at its front. This means that MENACE (O) plays in the corner. The human player (X) then plays in the centre. To make its next move, MENACE's operator finds the matchbox with the current position on, then opens it. This time it gives a blue bead which means MENACE plays in the bottom middle.

The human player then plays bottom right. Again MENACE's operator finds the box for the current position, it gives an orange bead and MENACE plays in the left middle. Finally the human player wins by playing top right.

MENACE has been beaten, but all is not lost. MENACE can now learn from its mistakes to stop the happening again.

How MENACE learns

MENACE lost the game above, so the beads that were chosen are removed from the boxes. This means that MENACE will be less likely to pick the same colours again and has learned. If MENACE had won, three beads of the chosen colour would have been added to each box, encouraging MENACE to do the same again. If a game is a draw, one bead is added to each box.

Initially, MENACE begins with four beads of each colour in the first move box, three in the third move boxes, two in the fifth move boxes and one in the final move boxes. Removing one bead from each box on losing means that later moves are more heavily discouraged. This helps MENACE learn more quickly, as the later moves are more likely to have led to the loss.

After a few games have been played, it is possible that some boxes may end up empty. If one of these boxes is to be used, then MENACE resigns. When playing against skilled players, it is possible that the first move box runs out of beads. In this case, MENACE should be reset with more beads in the earlier boxes to give it more time to learn before it starts resigning.

How MENACE performs

In Donald Michie's original tournament against MENACE, which lasted 220 games and 16 hours, MENACE drew consistently after 20 games.

Taken from Trial and error by Donald Michie [2]

Graph showing MENACE's performance in the original tournament. Edit: Added the redrawn graph on the left.

After a while, Michie tried playing some more unusual games. For a while he was able to defeat MENACE, but MENACE quickly learnt to stop losing. You can read more about the original MENACE in A matchbox game learning-machine by Martin Gardner [1] and Trial and error by Donald Michie [2].

You may like to experiment with different tactics against MENACE yourself.

Play against MENACE

I have written a JavaScript implemenation of MENACE for you to play against. The source code for this implementation is available on GitHub.

When playing this version of MENACE, the contents of the matchboxes are shown on the right hand side of the page. The numbers shown on the boxes show how many beads corresponding to that move remain in the box. The red numbers show which beads have been picked in the current game.

The initial numbers of beads in the boxes and the incentives can be adjusted by clicking Adjust MENACE's settings above the matchboxes. My version of MENACE starts with more beads in each box than the original MENACE to prevent the early boxes from running out of beads, causing MENACE to resign.

Additionally, next to the board, you can set MENACE to play against random, or a player 2 version of MENACE.

Edit: After hearing me do a lightning talk about MENACE at CCC, Oliver Child built a copy of MENACE. Here are some pictures he sent me:

Edit: Oliver has written about MENACE and the version he built in issue 03 of Chalkdust Magazine.

Edit: Inspired by Oliver, I have built my own MENACE. I took it to the MathsJam Conference 2016. It looks like this:

References

[1] A matchbox game learning-machine by Martin Gardner. Scientific American, March 1962. [link]

[2] Trial and error by Donald Michie. Penguin Science Survey, 1961.

Tags: menace, machine learning, games, javascript, programming, martin gardner, chalkdust magazine, noughts and crosses, mathsjam

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MENACE at Manchester Science Festival