The Martin Gardner column about teaching matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe
was March 1962 Scientific American, "Mathematical Games: How to build a
game-learning machine and then teach it to play and to win"
In the novel "The Adolescence of P-1", by Thomas Joseph Ryan (1977), a
college kid, fascinated by that article, implements an open-ended version
on an IBM 360/30 at Waterloo [remember WATFOR?], with a goal of cracking
additional machines through telecommunications links, and installing
itself.
It is, of course, unrealistic fiction to think that such a system could
be implemented on 1970s 360s. with less than 4GB. Besides, Windows
security is too good for it to install itself on modern systems.
oolcay itay
