Crafts Time (cont.)

Sorry, I just want to make a note on the last post I made, about the matchbox computer.

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Once upon a time, there was a guy named Donald Michie. When he was in WWII, he wanted to take Japanese and go fight on the Pacific front. Naturally, however, the class was full, and he did not sign up in time. However, he was not fazed in his war effort! He was recruited to help solve the enigmatic messages of the German army, and found that he was a natural in computer analysis. He began to work harder towards the study of artificial intelligence.

Within 20 years later, he invented the tic-tac-toe MENACE. MENACE was the Matchbox Educable Naughts And Crosses Engine, one of the first perfect-able robots to play the game of tic tac toe. He made the machine by diagramming all of the possible board states on 304 separate matchboxes. Although there are 19,683 possible board layouts*, Michie reduced this number to 304 by taking rotations, mirror images, and winning positions into account, thus reducing the number by over 98%.

*If you think about it, each of the 9 squares can be in one of three states: blank, X, or O. 3^9=19683.

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Stay coolio,
John