MENACE

MENACE (the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine) is a machine learning computer built from 304 matchboxes. MENACE was first built by Donald Michie in 1960.

In 2016, I built a copy of MENACE. This copy has since appeared on QI, the RI Christmas Lectures, and Click, as well as at Electromagnetic Field, various science festivals, and other events.

You can play against a virtual version of MENACE below. As you play against them, they will learn to be a better player. MENACE always goes first, and has already made their first move. You can make your move by clicking on the button in one of the empty squares.

 

 

Each of MENACE's matchboxes has a picture of a noughts and crosses position on it, and contains a collection of coloured beads. Each colour corresponds to a move MENACE could make. On MENACE's turn, the box with the current game is found, a bead is taken out at random, and MENACE makes the move that that bead represents.

The contents of MENACE's 304 matchboxes are shown to the rightbelow. The beads that have been used during this game are highlighted in red.

At the end of each game:

This graph shows the change in the number of beads in the first move box: this decreases when MENACE loses and increases when MENACE wins or draws (points will be added to this as you play against MENACE):

Over the course of many games, MENACE should get rid of beads that represent bad moves and get more beads that represent good moves, and so should learn to be a better noughts and crosses player. If you want to watch this happen without playing all the games yourself, you can use to dropdown box next to the game board to set them playing against a perfect or random player.

You can read more about how MENACE works in this blog post about MENACE, or you can watch this video about it on Matt Parker's YouTube channel. If you want to build your own copy of MENACE, you can find instructions of how to do this in this blog post about building MENACE, or you can read this blog post about how feasible it would be to build a MENACE-like machine for other games. You can find the source code for the implementation of MENACE on this page on GitHub.