Bertie the Brain

Bertie the Brain
Comedian Danny Kaye photographed having just won against the machine
Developer(s)	Josef Kates
Designer(s)	Josef Kates
Platform(s)	Computer game
Release	1950
Genre(s)	Tic-tac-toe
Mode(s)	Single-player

Bertie the Brain was an early computer game, and one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. It was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The four meter tall computer allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of tic-tac-toe against an artificial intelligence. The player entered a move on a lit keypad in the form of a three-by-three grid, and the game played out on a grid of lights overhead. The machine had an adjustable difficulty level. After two weeks on display by Rogers Majestic, the machine was disassembled at the end of the exhibition and largely forgotten as a curiosity.

Kates built the game to showcase his additron tube, a miniature version of the vacuum tube, though the transistor overtook it in computer development shortly thereafter. Patent issues prevented the additron tube from being used in computers besides Bertie before it was no longer useful. Bertie the Brain is a candidate for the first video game, as it was potentially the first computer game to have any sort of visual display of the game. It appeared only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game to use an electronic display. Bertie's use of lightbulbs rather than a screen with real-time visual graphics, however, much less moving graphics, does not meet some definitions of a video game.

Bertie the Brain was a computer game of tic-tac-toe, built by Dr. Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. Kates had previously worked at Rogers Majestic designing and building radar tubes during World War II, then after the war pursued graduate studies in the computing center at the University of Toronto while continuing to work at Rogers Majestic. While there, he helped build the University of Toronto Electronic Computer (UTEC), one of the first working computers in the world. He also designed his own miniature version of the vacuum tube, called the additron tube, which he registered with the Radio Electronics Television Manufacturers' Association on 20 March 1951 as type 6047.