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Lot 1058
FERRANTI DIGITAL COMPUTER FIRST BOOK ON A COMPUTER VIDEO GAME.
Faster Than Thought: The Ferranti Nimrod Digital Computer. Hollinwood, Lancashire: Ferranti, Ltd. 1951.
Faster Than Thought: The Ferranti Nimrod Digital Computer. Hollinwood, Lancashire: Ferranti, Ltd. 1951.
25 October 2022, 14:00 EDT
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FERRANTI DIGITAL COMPUTER
FIRST BOOK ON A COMPUTER VIDEO GAME.
Faster Than Thought: The Ferranti Nimrod Digital Computer. Hollinwood, Lancashire: Ferranti, Ltd. 1951.
8vo. Publisher's printed wrappers, bound with staples. Light soiling to wrappers, creasing, corrosion to staples.
Provenance: Provenance: Original Festival of Britain bookmark advertising the London book dealer Richard York laid in.
ONE OF THE FIRST DIGITAL VIDEO GAMES AND AN INTERESTNG STEP INTO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN COMPUTING.
Ferranti, who had just introduced the first commercially-available general purpose digital computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, custom built a computer to play the game Nim at the 1951 Festival of Britain, which was a national exhibition held to commemorate centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition. The public were encouraged to play, and one famous visitor's experience is recounted in the following anecdote by Alan Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges: "Alan spent August 1951 at Cambridge as usual, and from there a party went down on the train to London for the Festival of Britain. They went to the Science Museum in South Kensington where the science and technology exhibits were housed. They came across the NIMROD, which Ferranti were exhibiting. The Ferranti people were pleased to see Alan and said, 'Oh Dr Turing, would you like to play the machine?' which of course he did, and knowing the rule himself, he managed to win. The machine dutifully flashed up MACHINE LOSES in lights, but then went into a distinctly Turing-esque sulk, refusing to come to a stop and flashing MACHINE WINS instead. Alan was delighted at having elicited such human behavior from a machine." Turing was an obvious candidate for the game, having just published in Mind his landmark paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which famously defines artificial intelligence and sets forth the Turing Test.
The present book contains a detailed description of the game and the working of the computer, as well as a survey of work on machine intelligence at the time. The text notes that "the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems ... very similar to those required to examine the economies of a country in which neither a state of monopoly nor of free trade exists" (p 19).
Faster Than Thought: The Ferranti Nimrod Digital Computer. Hollinwood, Lancashire: Ferranti, Ltd. 1951.
8vo. Publisher's printed wrappers, bound with staples. Light soiling to wrappers, creasing, corrosion to staples.
Provenance: Provenance: Original Festival of Britain bookmark advertising the London book dealer Richard York laid in.
ONE OF THE FIRST DIGITAL VIDEO GAMES AND AN INTERESTNG STEP INTO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN COMPUTING.
Ferranti, who had just introduced the first commercially-available general purpose digital computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, custom built a computer to play the game Nim at the 1951 Festival of Britain, which was a national exhibition held to commemorate centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition. The public were encouraged to play, and one famous visitor's experience is recounted in the following anecdote by Alan Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges: "Alan spent August 1951 at Cambridge as usual, and from there a party went down on the train to London for the Festival of Britain. They went to the Science Museum in South Kensington where the science and technology exhibits were housed. They came across the NIMROD, which Ferranti were exhibiting. The Ferranti people were pleased to see Alan and said, 'Oh Dr Turing, would you like to play the machine?' which of course he did, and knowing the rule himself, he managed to win. The machine dutifully flashed up MACHINE LOSES in lights, but then went into a distinctly Turing-esque sulk, refusing to come to a stop and flashing MACHINE WINS instead. Alan was delighted at having elicited such human behavior from a machine." Turing was an obvious candidate for the game, having just published in Mind his landmark paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which famously defines artificial intelligence and sets forth the Turing Test.
The present book contains a detailed description of the game and the working of the computer, as well as a survey of work on machine intelligence at the time. The text notes that "the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems ... very similar to those required to examine the economies of a country in which neither a state of monopoly nor of free trade exists" (p 19).