Correva l’anno 1985 e mio zio, il pittore Libero Meledina, uomo di cultura spropositata, conscio della mia passione per l’informatica, cercò di spiegarmi nel suo studio a Sassari il lavoro di Donald Michie, un valente professore dell’università di Edimburgo, il quale scrisse un incredibile algoritmo di auto-apprendimento del tic-tac-toe, da noi conosciuto come tris.

In 1960, he developed the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (MENACE), one of the first programs capable of learning to play a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Since computers were not readily available at this time, Michie implemented his program with about 304 matchboxes, each representing a unique board state. Each matchbox was filled with coloured beads, each representing a different move in that board state. The quantity of a colour indicated the “certainty” that playing the corresponding move would lead to a win. The program was trained by playing hundreds of games and updating the quantities of beads in each matchbox depending on the outcome of each game.

da Wikipedia Inglese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Michie
(incredibilmente non esiste la pagina italiana)