In the spring of 1940, an electromechanical automaton called the Nimatron was displayed in the Westinghouse Building at the New York World’s Fair. It weighed a ton and could play the Nim game against a human. The Nim machine played more than 100,000 games (and won 90,000 of them). He came up with his Nim machine while looking at Geiger counter circuits. In building the Nimatron, he eschewed vacuum tubes; instead, he took slow but reliable electromagnetic relays. This is probably how the invention of the electronic computer eluded him. Two members of the Westinghouse Electric Company allegedly invented it on their lunch break. Condon, the signer of the U.S. patent, not only emphasized the entertainment purpose of the Nimatron, but also illustrated „how a series of electrical relays can be made to make a decision by a fairly simple mathematical procedure.“ The Nimatron represented the groups of objects by four rows of light bulbs. In the graphic above, you can see them on the control panel and on the sides of the cube. At the start of a game, a few bulbs light up in each row, sometimes only one. The visitor has the first move. He or she presses the button The Nimatron was set to play Nim with 4 stacks of up to 7 tiles. The human player started the game, and only 9 initial configurations were possible (due to space limitations). Each of them was an uncertain combination, so the human player had a chance to win. In the corresponding row, a lamp goes dark. By repeated pressing, several lights can be extinguished. Now it’s the machine’s turn. After a short time of deliberation, clack-clack-clack, light bulbs go out in the same row or in another row. Then it’s the human’s turn again; it goes on like this until the end of the game. Nimatron won most of the games, and the few human winners were allowed to take home a coin with the inscription „Nim Champ“. After the World’s Fair, Nimatron came into the possession of the Pittsburgh Planetarium. In 1942, it was displayed at a convention in New York.
