Top all-time · #5771
Matthew Scroggs
Personal blog · mscroggs.co.uk/blogmathgames
Matthew Scroggs's personal blog at mscroggs.co.uk covers math and games. Since 2016, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “Menace (The Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matthew Scroggs's pages on MENACE, the 1961 matchbox machine that learns noughts and crosses, and on estimating location from Big Ben's chimes. Commenters cite them as resources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I am Matthew Scroggs. I like maths. On this website, you can find my blog and a collection of Sunday afternoon maths puzzles.
Most-linked posts?
- Menace (The Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-06
- MENACE3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-10-21
What Hacker News says?
In the late 1990s, after watching the movie WarGames (1983), I saw a scene where Matthew Broderick's character is researching the computer scientist Stephen Falken to try to guess his password. There was a brief glimpse of a Scientific American magazine cover[1] titled "Falken's maze: Teaching a machine to learn". That sounded fascinating and I went to the university library to find that issue of Scientific American…
Comment linking /blog/tags/books
on “What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?”Submitted MENACE as a story · 63 points
HN discussionEstimating location from hearing Big Ben strike thirteen: https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/44
Comment linking /blog/44
on “Oxfordshire clock still keeping village on time after 500 years”Submitted Build your own MENACE (matchbox-powered machine learning computer) as a story · 38 points
HN discussionMaybe largely off-topic but I still remember the fun I had actually building as a kid (after reading an article in Scientific American by Martin Gardner) the MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine): http://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/19 For the beads I used Smarties, so each time the machine lost I ate the "wrong colour one".
Comment linking /blog/19
on “Evolutionary algorithm outperforms deep-learning machines at video games”Submitted Menace (The Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's a textual explanation here: http://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/19
Comment linking /blog/19
on “A pile of matchboxes that can learn [video]”Submitted Puzzle Advent Calendar as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI really like the physicality of this method of teaching people about ML. Often times people get lost in all the abstraction, especially if they haven't be trained to be comfortable with an abstract concept on top of an abstract concept. If you want to play against MENACE you can do so here: http://www.mscroggs.co.uk/menace/ .
Comment linking /menace/
on “A pile of matchboxes that can learn [video]”Submitted Interesting Tautologies as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a version of MENACE online that you can train from scratch: https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/menace/ Around the 50th game it starts drawing pretty consistently.
Comment linking /menace/
on “A Matchbox Game-Learning Machine (1991) [pdf]”Submitted Mathsteroids as a story · 2 points
HN discussionStand up maths did an episode on a similar "machine" called MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine) that learns to play tick tac toe. https://youtu.be/R9c-_neaxeU The video description has additional links to resources: https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/19 http://chalkdustmagazine.com/tag/menace/
Comment linking /blog/19
on “A Matchbox Game-Learning Machine (1991) [pdf]”Submitted TMiP 2023 Puzzle Hunt as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitting note: I was surprised this hasn't been posted on HN before, since it's one of (maybe the?) earliest examples of proving how a computer can learn from failures over lots of training runs to gain "intelligence", as well as being a relatively easy to understand explanation of how that can work, so it seems interesting historically considering the current state of machine learning in the world. It's also the…
Comment linking /menace/
on “MENACE - Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (1961 mechanical ML / RL)”Submitted Logo Asteroids as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Mathsteroids on Hyperbolic Surfaces as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Databet as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Approximating π as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 2021 Chalkdust puzzle Christmas card as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Close Encounters of the Second Kind as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making Names in Life as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
