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The Unbeatable Game from the 60s: Dr NIM

Stand-up Maths · 7.2M views · 2016-01-26 · 11:39

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Overview

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains single-pile Nim and the trick that wins it, using Dr NIM, a 1960s mechanical plastic computer that plays perfectly. He teaches the strategy so viewers can beat friends.

On Hacker News

HN links it as a fun explanation of the purely mechanical Dr. Nim game in threads about early game computers and marble-based binary math.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2016–2023

Topics

Recreational & visual mathProbability & game theoryChess, board games & puzzles
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nimdr nimmechanical computerrecreational mathgame theory

What people said

AndrewOMartin · 2023-07 · Recommendation

If this kind of thing amuses you can buy a purely mechanical implementation called either Braino or Dr. Nim for about £10. Here's a video on the subject from Matt Parker @ Standup Maths. [VIDEO]

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jerf · 2022-07 · Reference

"The new feudal aristocracy would be the ones running the demons." The question of ownership is huge and I think still underaddressed, even after some good work like the referenced Lena, or Tom Scott's "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" [LINK] . I was realizing a couple of weeks ago that if you do believe all the materialistic things cstross outlines, that a solid argument can be made that it may be never rational to upload your mind, on the ground that there is simply no circumstance I can imagine where you will "own" your own substrate. Arguably, owning your computational substrate is a fundamental aspect of life that we take for granted today. (Or, if you won't consider what you have now "ownership", at least nobody else does either.) But there is no circumstance in the forseeable future in which anyone can own their substrate. For a while I thought a rich person could do it, but then I thought about the entire supply chain involved in creating any brain scanner and subsequent computational device, and the amount of hardware left out in the real world where others can affect it, and I realized, you just can never assume that you are doing anything other than flinging yourself irrevocably into a locked box that is not under your control. Even if a rich person thinks they funded the entire project, brand new software, brand new hardware, there are thousands if not millions of points where either mistakes or deliberate sabotage for control may have been don

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brownbat · 2016-11 · Reference

These remind me of Dr. Nim, the unbeatable single-player board game from the 60s, which also used marbles to do binary math: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Stand-up Maths, played through YouTube.

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