Nim

History

Variants of nim have been played since ancient times. The game is said to have originated in China—it closely resembles the Chinese game of (), or "picking stones"—but the origin is uncertain; the earliest European references to nim are from the beginning of the 16th century. Its current name was coined by Charles L. Bouton of Harvard University, who also developed the complete theory of the game in 1901, but the origins of the name were never fully explained. The Oxford English Dictionary derives the name from the German verb , meaning "take". At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Westinghouse displayed a machine, the Nimatron, that played nim. From May 11 to October 27, 1940, only a few people were able to beat the machine in that six-month period; if they did, they were presented with a coin that said "Nim Champ". It was also one of the first-ever electronic computerized games. Ferranti built a nim-playing computer which was displayed at the Festival of Britain in 1951. In 1952, Herbert Koppel, Eugene Grant and Howard Baller, engineers from the W. L. Maxson Corporation, developed a machine weighing which played nim against a human opponent and regularly won. A nim playing machine has been described made from tinkertoys. The game of nim was the subject of Martin Gardner's February 1958 "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. A version of nim is played—and has symbolic importance—in the French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad (1961).