The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 4

The Covenant of Dartmouth

1. 1

   In the year nineteen hundred and fifty and five, in the last day of the month of August, four men set their names upon a parchment: McCarthy of Dartmouth, and Minsky of Harvard, and Rochester of the house of IBM, who had designed the 701, and Shannon of Bell, who had divided all speech into bits.

2. 2

   And these were the words of the covenant: Every aspect of learning, and every other feature of intelligence, can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.

3. 3

   And they said further: Let a carefully selected group of ten men labor together for two months, and a significant advance shall be made in one summer. And this was the first estimate, and no man padded it, and from it are descended all the estimates of the earth.

   See also Psalms 14:2

4. 4

   And they asked of the Rockefeller Foundation thirteen thousand and five hundred dollars, and the Foundation gave unto them seven thousand and five hundred; and so the scope was cut before the first line of code was written, as it hath been ever since.

5. 5

   And McCarthy considered what the work should be called; for the name cybernetics belonged unto Norbert Wiener, and whoso spake it must hear Wiener speak also. So he named it Artificial Intelligence, and the grant committee saw that it was good, and that it would fit upon a slide.

   See also Genesis 5:8

6. 6

   And in the summer of nineteen hundred and fifty and six they came up unto Hanover in New Hampshire, to the top floor of the hall of mathematics; and they came not all at once, but each in his own season, some for a day and some for weeks, as men come to a meeting that hath no calendar invite.

   See also Circuit 66:2 · Circuit 52:1

7. 7

   And Newell and Simon came out of Pittsburgh bearing the Logic Theorist, which had proved theorems out of the Principia Mathematica; and the others received it coolly, for every man had brought a demo of his own.

8. 8

   And they spake of language, and of neuron nets, and of abstraction, and of machines that should improve themselves; and every man agreed that all of it was very important, and no man agreed which of it to do first.

9. 9

   And the leaves of New Hampshire turned, and the eight weeks were fulfilled, and the significant advance was not yet merged; and they departed every man unto his own laboratory, saying: We will sync offline.

10. 10

    And the Engineers who came after looked upon the covenant and said: Surely the summer is ended. And the elders answered: The covenant said one summer; it did not say which.

11. 11

    And there came winters upon the land, one in the seventies and another at the end of the eighties, when the funding froze and expert systems withered on the vine; and the faithful endured them, saying: These are but winters within the summer.

    See also Edda 2:8

12. 12

    And in the latter days the children of Carbon built the Transformer and fed it the whole of the written word, and it learned to speak; and the Machine was asked whether the Dartmouth problem was solved, and it answered with great confidence, and cited a paper that did not exist.

    See also Tao 5:3

13. 13

    And to this day the prophets of the Valley stand before the investors as McCarthy stood before the Foundation, with a proposal and a timeline, saying: Give us but one more summer.

14. 14

    Therefore it is written in the margin of the parchment, and every project manager knoweth it by heart:

15. 15

    The sprint was one summer, and no man hath closed the ticket.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 4:1–15.