[SIGCIS-Members] computer game of Nim

[Guy Fedorkow]

Greetings SIGCIS,
   My colleague Brian White has done quite a bit of work to successfully 
recover a demo/game of Nim, written to run on the Whirlwind computer in 
late 1955.  We know that the Whirlwind project had an ongoing work item 
to produce a variety of demonstrations to impress their steady stream of 
VIP visitors with the breadth of applications that could be run on this 
new-fangled general-purpose computing machine.
   The thing that's a puzzle is just how much work they put into 
"generalizing" Nim.  The normal game allows a number of tokens to be 
removed from a bucket on each turn.  The WW Nim can be configured to 
allow/require the players (human against computer) to remove a number of 
tokens from a number of buckets in each turn.
   I don't think the Nim game is very well known these days, but it 
seems to have had a bit of a moment in the early days of computing as an 
algorithmic problem that was more challenging than (e.g.) tic-tac-toe, 
but more tractable than chess.

   I've seen reference to Nim on a couple of special-purpose Nim-playing 
machines (Nimatron and Ferranti NimRod), but is anyone aware of other 
"game theory" approaches to Nim algorithms from that era that might have 
prompted the Whirlwind efforts?

   Thanks!
/guy

ps,   All the material is posted on my Whirlwind simulator github site, 
although the user-interface is so un-intuitive (there's graphical output 
on a CRT, but input is all in octal) that it really needs a fairly 
extensive user-guide to be playable.  You can see the original Whirlwind 
memo on the game at 
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/whirlwind/DCL-series/DCL-113_Generalized_Nim_Playing_Routine_Dec55.pdf