page_title: Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine
section_title: Origin
hierarchical_section_title: Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine / Origin
caption_attribution_description: English: Donald Michie teaching a group of industrial Journeyman students at Turing Institute
context_page_description: The Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine or MENACE was an analogue computer made up of 304 matchboxes designed and built by Donald Michie in 1961. It was designed to play human opponents in games of noughts and crosses by returning a move for any given state of play and to refine its strategy through reinforcement learning.
  Computer equipment was not readily available for non-government use, so Michie worked around this restriction by building it out of matchboxes.The matchboxes used by Michie each represented a single possible layout of a Noughts and Crosses grid. When the computer first played, it would randomly choose moves based on the current layout. As it played more games, through a reinforcement loop, it disqualified strategies that led to losing games, and supplemented strategies that led to winning games. Michie held a tournament against MENACE in 1961, wherein he experimented with different openings.
  Following MENACE's maiden tournament against Michie, it was shown to be a successful computer. Michie's essays on MENACE's weight initialisation and the BOXES algorithm used by MENACE became popular in the field of computer science research.
context_section_description: Donald Michie had been on the team decrypting the German Tunny Code during World War II. Fifteen years later, he wanted to further display his mathematical and computational prowess with an early convolutional neural network. Since computer equipment was not available for such uses, he decided to display and demonstrate artificial intelligence in a more esoteric format and constructed a working model out of matchboxes and beads. (or beans) He chose Noughts and Crosses as it was a simple game with fewer potential moves than other games.
  MENACE "learned" by playing increasing matches of Noughts and Crosses. Each time, it would eliminate a losing strategy by the human player confiscating the beads that corresponded to each move. It reinforced winning strategies by making the moves more likely, by supplying extra beads. This was one of the earliest versions of the Reinforcement Loop, the schematic algorithm of looping the algorithm, dropping unsuccessful strategies until only the winning ones remain. This model starts as completely random, and gradually trains.
caption: Donald Michie teaching
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