Margaret Masterman's Panoramix Game

In a lecture given at Bedford College, London in 1975, on the topic of ‘Life, Death, Resurrection of the Academic Woman’, Margaret Masterman introduced the Panoramix Game. Masterman, a philosopher and computational linguist who founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit and co-founded Lucy Cavendish College, invented the simple computational game to analyse a problem that still persists today: the male dominance of academia’s higher echelons, in spite of the increased number of women completing undergraduate degrees.

In the game, players make Panoramix Grids: models of arguments built using simple binary notation, which can be contrasted with one another to analyse any situation. Masterman used the game to challenge the argument that women’s lack of representation in academia did not constitute discrimination; by making explicit the chain of causality being constructed in this argument, and the omissions of data within it, her grid forces the reader to consider the possibility that the argument, by its very construction, sets women academics up for failure. For Masterman, the Panoramix Game had the philosophical benefit of making the player concentrate not only on getting the samples and building the columns, but also on selecting the most important characteristics of a situation, and paying attention to what is omitted and included in a given argument.

At this event, attendees will replay the game using contemporary statistics about women’s participation in academia, before testing the mechanics of the game on other sets of statistics and speculative arguments. Expect to learn about and discuss Masterman’s life, work, and sense of humour; her use of the Panoramix Game to demonstrate her vision for Lucy Cavendish College, then a mature, women-only college; and her ideas about computational sociology, classification algorithms and more.