Talk:Nimatron

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Nimatron/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Eviolite (talk · contribs) 19:48, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Taking this review. eviolite (talk) 19:48, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Notes:

• Images are good - one is fair use with a reasonable rationale based on an established NFCC template, and all are clearly relevant with captions.
• Sourcing is good - only concern is that [1] is an interview and is used a lot, but I'm not sure a better source could be found.
• "The machine, which weighed over a metric ton, displayed four lines of seven light bulbs both in front of the player and on four sides of an overhead cube, and alternated with players in removing one or more lights from each row until the lights were all extinguished." was a bit confusing to me, maybe split it up

• Split up

• Not sure what "by countries" means - the entire phrase "by countries and other companies" seems redundant

• Fixed- changed to groups like I did in the final section

• Clarify about the 1939 World's Fair - I didn't realize that it was open during the same period of both years, so "during the break in the fair" and "second season" was confusing

• Clarified

• I think the description of Nim could be better - it's important to note that there are multiple sets (piles) of objects, and that players can only take from one of them each turn.

• Added a line around this

• "the relay division" - consider adding "of Westinghouse"

• Done

• "Condon added a delay" - source says "we", not Condon specifically

• Fixed

• "players winning "5 or 10% of the time"" - the paper is probably a better source for this; it says the game won 90,000 of the over-100,000 games. In the interview Condon says he has forgotten the exact numbers.

• Done

• Link Borden (company)

• Done

• "convention of the Allied Social Science Associations in New York City under the sponsorship of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics." is the same wording as the source, though there might not be many ways to rephrase that

• Whoops, thought I fixed that- tweaked a bit.

• I can only see Google Books snippets, but I can't seem to find where the source says "but its impact on digital computers and computer games is minimal".

• Hmm, that's one of the few lines left from before the rewrite, and it's impact was minimal but it's not in that source that I can see and I'm not finding another source that states that so clearly. Removed.

• Change "decision" to 'decision'

• Done

• Should explicitly clarify that he found it a failure because he missed the opportunity to make something more useful (which I did not understand at first)

• Done

• I don't see how Nimrod fits as "one such computer" as it was also specialized to play Nim (rather than a practical application.)

• Expanded a bit; what I'm trying to say is that unlike the Nimatron, which just had a bunch of relays in a pattern so that it would turn off lightbulbs in a way that reflected the game of Nim and couldn't do anything else or be changed beyond re-building it as a different machine, the Nimrod was an actual general-purpose computer running a program stored in memory... which happened to be a program for playing Nim, and they attached a bank of lightbulbs as the output device. They could have (but didn't and didn't intend to) taken the same Nimrod hardware and put a different program on it, while the Nimatron could only ever do this one thing. It was a stripped-down version of the Ferranti Mark 1 that Ferranti had started selling earlier in the year (as the very first commercial general purpose computer). To extrapolate a bit, the Nimatron was a neat toy but it wasn't a true "computer", but by using electro-mechanical relays to store the current state of the game Condon had stumbled on the same way that within a decade groups like Ferranti were storing the state of running programs on true general-purpose computers that could be programmed to do many things (with vacuum tubes, but the same idea). He shouldn't have been so harsh on himself- there's a lot more to a computer than just storing state, but it was a missed opportunity. That Ferranti demonstrated their computer running a Nim program is probably not a coincidence (though it may be, Nim is a much easier game to model than most board games like checkers or chess). --PresN 01:16, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

That's all for my comments; @PresN: holding for now. eviolite (talk) 14:03, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Eviolite: Responded inline, thanks for reviewing! --PresN 01:16, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

@PresN: Thanks for the response. Sorry I miscommunicated with the 5-10% of the time point - it was in Condon's paper rather than the thesis, which I've fixed. Also thanks for the clarification re Nimrod, as I didn't realize it was programmable - now looking again at the source I see that it is described as using programming principles. Anyway, I'm happy to promote this to GA; great work! eviolite (talk) 02:33, 7 January 2022 (UTC)