In 1951, the British computer company Ferranti developed the Nim-playing digital computer Nimrod. Nimrod was designed to illustrate the principles of automatic computers in general and was the first computer exclusively designed to play a game (Bowden, 1953, 201). Nimrod was displayed for six months at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain in London and took on all comers(Bowden, 1953, 286).

It was later shown at the Trade Fair in Berlin. Germans had never seen anything like it and came to see it in thousands. It was neccessary to call out special police to control the crowds. The machine became even more popular after it had defeated the Economics Minister Dr. Ludwig | history of computer playing, anker helms jørgensen: an early danish computer game: the case of nim, piet hein, and regnecentralen

datamuseum, danmark

the proceedings of hinc2 will be published by ifip next spring ...
in the meantime ola nordal has a conference report