On 6 October 1951 an electronic computer operated for the first time on German soil. For three weeks, the "Nimrod" from the English company Ferranti was the star of the Berlin Industrial Show. The Nimrod was not a universally programmable computer, but a special machine with 480 vacuum tubes. Nimrod had been originally built by Ferranti for the Festival of Britain in London. At the end of the Festival the "electronic brain" was flown at short notice to the industrial show on the Charlottenburg fairground and set up in the British pavilion. There visitors played against the computer, with usually no chance of winning, if they did not understand the logic of Nim. One of those trying it on opening day, 6 October 1951, was the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs at that time Ludwig Erhard, who lost three times in three games.
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During its three week stay in Germany Nimrod was surrounded by visitors all the time, and had to be guarded constantly by a number of security police who patrolled the queues. The functioning of Nimrod can be explored with a simulator, which is, however, only available for BeOS. The model for Nimrod was the Nimatron, a "computing robot" that played Nim, which was designed by Westinghouse for the 1939 World Exhibition in New York. This world exhibition, which gave Walt Disney the idea for his Disneyland, is still considered today as the most progressive of its type. The Nimatron was presented as the sort of computational aid that would [in the future] be at the service of the "average 'Middleton' family". Each visitor who played against the Nimatron got a stick-on button "I have seen the Future". The computer scientist David Gelernter, the 1994/95 victim of an Unabomber assassination attempt, wrote "1939: The Lost World of the Fair" a remarkable 'fact novel' about the world exhibition, which mentions the Nimatron: "it was a computational domestic help, which appealed to an America that still believed in its dreams. But then the war came." Nimrod, its improved British descendant, was named more darkly.
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| NIMROD control desk. The demonstrator would sit on the far side, and visitors would be seated on the near side to pit their skill against the computer. |
The game that introduced electronic computers in Germany was already well known. Nim was introduced - with its solution - in the year 1902 by the Harvard mathematician Charles Bouton. Bouton modified an old Chinese game named Fan Tan to his own specification and baptized it with the Germanic name Nim [in German meaning "takes!"]. Bouton, who wanted to use the game to demonstrate the advantage of the binary number system, found a simple (binary) formula, with which, from the state of play, players can determine correct moves immediately. In the same year the German mathematician Paul Ahrens, in the "Scientific Weekly Review", proved that the [supposed] relation to Fan Tan is simply nonsense.
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| NIMROD exhibition at Berlin Industrial Show. |
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