Language Models: The Beginnings

Claude Shannon liked to play games when he wasn't particularly busy building mathematical models. In one of his party games (the Shannon Switching Game), he drew a graph that had two special nodes A and B. Each edge of the graph is either coloured or deleted--the initial state of each edge is decided randomly. Two players, one named Cut and the other Short, make a move alternately. Short's job is to colour an edge in each of his turns; he wins if he can establish a coloured path from A to B. Cut's job is to prevent Short from doing so; if Cut manages to partition A and B, she wins. The Shannon Switching Game is quite enthralling.