A closer look
Decades before we were losing to AI in video games, an electromechanical bully called the Nimatron was humiliating humans at the 1940 World's Fair. Designed by Edward Condon, this massive relay-based machine played the math-logic game Nim with terrifying perfection. In fact, it calculated its winning moves so aggressively fast that the engineers had to add an artificial delay to the machine's response. They literally had to slow the computer down just so fairgoers wouldn't feel completely intellectually inferior to a box of clicking switches.
