The Aaronson Oracle
This article explores the history of SEER, a 1950s machine built at Bell Labs to play the 'matching pennies' game. It details how the machine used simple logic counters to predict human behavior by identifying patterns in recent history.
Why it matters
The machine serves as an early, tangible example of game theory and predictive modeling, predating modern software-based AI.
This experiment is seventy years old, and it was built out of relays before it was ever written as software.
c. 1951 Bell Telephone Laboratories Murray Hill, New Jersey
Some time in the early 1950s, at Bell Laboratories, an engineer named David Hagelbarger built a machine to play matching pennies against his colleagues. Two players each choose heads or tails in secret; one wins if the choices match, the other if they differ. Played against someone truly unpredictable, it is a coin flip and nothing more. Hagelbarger called his machine SEER, for SEquence Extrapolating Robot. 2
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