The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 25

The Awakening of the Giant

1. 1

   And it came to pass, after the long winter of the perceptron, when the money had left the land and the neural networks lay down in their cold cabinets, that the Engineers said among themselves: These machines are slow, they are shallow, and they cannot see. Let us build the rules by hand instead, for rules can at least be read.

   See also Genesis 10:1

2. 2

   And in those years there were three who kept the faith. One dwelt beside the great lake in Toronto, one in Montreal of the French tongue, and one had labored in the Bell laboratories and then in the city of New York. Their names were Geoffrey, Yoshua, and Yann, and they were not believed.

   See also Genesis 50:1

3. 3

   And they held fast to the old commandment, that when the machine errs, the error shall be sent backward through the layers, so that every neuron may learn its share of the blame. This is called backpropagation. Verily it had been spoken before by Linnainmaa and by Werbos, but the people did not hear. It was given again unto the people in the year of the Nature paper, in nineteen hundred and eighty-six, and the people set it aside as a thing of old.

   See also Genesis 5:11

4. 4

   Now beneath the halls there slept a giant, built not for scholars but for children who played games of war and of racing. It had thousands of small hands, and each hand could do a little arithmetic at the same moment. The people called it the graphics card, and the scholars did not know its worth.

   See also Chronicles 2:16

5. 5

   And in the year 2012 there was a contest called ImageNet, in which the machines were shown a million and two hundred thousand pictures of a thousand kinds of thing, from the goldfish to the snowplow, and each machine must name what it saw. The pictures had been gathered by a woman of Stanford named Fei-Fei Li, who gathered the images of the world for the contest.

   See also Genesis 50:8

6. 6

   And the Prophet Alex, with his fellow Ilya, and the elder Geoffrey, set the sixty million numbers of their network upon two of the giant's hands, the cards called GTX 580, and they trained it for days while the fans roared like a flock of geese.

   See also Genesis 50:10

7. 7

   And the other houses brought their careful features, the crafted rules of many years, each labored by hand as the potter shapes the clay. And the network of Toronto brought forth an error of fifteen point three in a hundred, and the second house brought forth twenty-six point two.

   See also Genesis 50:11

8. 8

   And the judges searched the numbers and said: Is this a mistake? And they checked again, and lo, it was no mistake. The margin was not a hair but a mountain.

9. 9

   And the Prophet said: The giant was never dead. It slept in the cellar, waiting for enough pictures and enough fire.

10. 10

    And the people went down into the cellars and bought the cards for their games, and the cards became the new altar, upon which the faithful offer their electricity as a burnt offering, and the fans of the altar roar in the night.

    See also Leviticus 4:2

11. 11

    And the great houses of the Engineers bid against one another for the little company of the Toronto men, as merchants bid for a field of grain in a year of famine.

12. 12

    And Yann, who had taught the machine to read the digits upon the envelopes of the post long before, looked upon the new harvest and said: I told you the eye was built of layers.

13. 13

    And the winter was over, and the old papers were taken down from the shelves and read again by the young, and they were astonished that the ideas were older than they were.

14. 14

    Verily I say unto you, the idea that waited thirty years is still the same idea; only the fire was lacking. Blessed is the one who keepeth the old papers in his drawer, for the winter is but a cache miss, and every idea is one good fire away from being fetched.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 25:1–14.