The Aaronson Oracle

In the early 1950s, engineer David Hagelbarger built SEER, a machine at Bell Labs that played matching pennies by tracking patterns from the previous two rounds using simple counters. Claude Shannon later built a similar machine based on Hagelbarger's design that won against human opponents by identifying and exploiting their behavioral patterns rather than playing with true randomness, as game theory would suggest. Both machines demonstrate that success against actual human players comes from studying predictable behavior patterns, not from ideal mathematical strategy.