{
  "id": 14448618,
  "title": "The Aaronson Oracle",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/14/the-aaronson-oracle",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-14T12:16:35.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hacker News",
    "slug": "hacker-news",
    "url": "https://aaronsonoracle.com/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The Aaronson Oracle is a machine that was built in 1951 at Bell Laboratories by an engineer named David Hagelbarger to play the game matching pennies against his colleagues. The game involves two players secretly choosing heads or tails, and one player wins if both choose the same option, while the other wins if their choices differ. Played against someone truly unpredictable, matching pennies is a coin flip with no way to gain an advantage. Hagelbarger's machine, called SEER (for SEquence Extrapolating Robot), tracked three facts about the last two rounds of play to determine the best move to make. Claude Shannon, who worked down the hall, built his own machine and compared it to SEER. Shannon's machine assumed that the player would follow patterns in their choices, and it used randomness to avoid being predictable. Shannon's memo, published in 1953, noted that his machine was not unbeatable and could be beaten three out of four times on paper. In 2020, researchers reimplemented both machines in software and found that Shannon's machine won 55.8% of the time, while Aaronson's Oracle won 59% of the time against human players. The Aaronson Oracle ignores winning and losing and instead focuses on the sequences of choices made by the player. It counts recent runs of presses and uses a notebook to keep track of patterns and guesses, shortening the question asked to the player based on the frequency of previous patterns.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}