Shannon, Claude [Elwood]

Presentation of a Maze-Solving Machine [reproduced paper]

Murray Hill, N. J. Bell Laboratories circa 1952. Later printing. [1]-8 pages. 10 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches. Stapled upper left corner. A poor quality copy of a printed paper that is difficult to read in places. Handwritten on the original copy was "Cybernetics - Trans. of the 8th Conference, 1952, Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 565 Park Ave., N.Y. 21, N. Y." Very Good. Wraps. [28624]


This is a reproduced paper from "Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Eighth Conference, March 15-16, 1951, New York, N.Y.," Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1952, pp 173-180.

"In a grainy film shot at Bell Laboratories in 1952, mathematician and Bell Labs researcher Claude Shannon, SM ’40, Ph.D. ’40, stands beside a machine of his own construction. First built in 1950, it was one of the world’s first examples of machine learning: a robotic maze-solving mouse known as Theseus. The Theseus of ancient Greek mythology navigated a minotaur’s labyrinth and escaped by following a thread he’d used to mark his path. But Shannon’s electromechanical toy was able to “remember” its path with the help of telephone relay switches." (Klein)

A year earlier, Shannon demonstrated the device at the 1951 Macy Foundation Cybernetics Conference. The mouse wasn’t yet called Theseus, just a “pointing device” or, in one writer’s account, “rat.” Regardless of the name, the response told Bell Labs they had a real PR winner.

"the mouse-maze system ... was a phenomenon and made Bell Labs and Shannon somewhat of a celebrity outside the usual scientific circles. Life Magazine, Popular Science, and others ran articles about it. … “Shannon would later tell a former teacher of his that Theseus had been 'a demonstration device to make vivid the ability of a machine to solve, by trial and error, a problem, and remember the solution.' To the question of whether a certain rough kind of intelligence could be 'created,' Shannon had offered an answer: yes, it could. Machines could learn. … Learning and memory could be programmed and plotted, the script written into a device that looked, from a certain perspective, as an extremely simple precursor of a brain...." (Soni and Goodman, pp 205-206)

"Shannon’s diminutive automaton, fondly christened “Rat,” proceeded to work its way through to the end. Although its movements were not smooth or graceful, and although it looked nothing like an actual maze-navigating rodent, it performed with something like aplomb. When at last it hit the “goal,” a designated sensor on the grid, it lit itself up, rang a bell, and stopped its own motors, as if in celebration. “The machine has solved the maze,” declared its inventor—who, just three years earlier, had authored for Bell Labs his Mathematical Theory of Communication...What gripped the audience was a quality akin to pathos: Rather than watching something (say, a highly trained lab rat) simply succeed automatically in solving a maze, the audience was watching it trying, failing, testing, going awry, and finally making its way. The electronic rat and maze were one system, and the system, in an “all too human” way (in the words of one onlooker), worked. Rat learned. This struck the assembled crowd as significant. It offered a model on which all kinds of social and biological systems could be based." (Lemov)

We offer a copy of the printed conference transaction discussion, including an interpreted transcript of questions and answers from some assembled scientists and Shannon. Theseus, as the mouse became known, is referred to in the document as a"pointing finger." The maze is called a "range of 5 x 5 squares".

The text reproduced by Sloane and Wyner is somewhat different. Their article contains two figures (1 & 2) which show a diagram of the machine and a photograph of Shannon placing a mechanical mouse into it. The copy offered here only has the first figure (labeled Figure 8) and lacks the image of Shannon inserting the mouse into the machine.

The MIT Museum holds in their collections the original Theseus machine (albeit no longer in working order), together with blueprints, photographs, and a film of the device in action (accession #2007.030.001). The 1952 video is available on youtube, a brilliant piece of PR by Bell Laboratories.

PROVENANCE: The personal files of Claude E. Shannon (unmarked). There were multiple examples of this item in Shannon's files.

REFERENCES:
Sloane and Wyner, "Claude Elwood Shannon Collected Papers," #70
Soni and Goodman, "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age," Simon & Schuster: New York, 2017
Klein, Daniel, "Mighty Mouse" in the "MIT Technology Review," December 19, 2018
Lemov, Rebecca, "Running Amok in Labyrinthine Systems: The Cyber-Behaviorist Origins of Soft Torture," in LIMN, Issue 1

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