Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1u9n87f/a_eulogy_for_the_dartmouth_dream_19562026
Seventy years ago today, on June 18, 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon proposed a noble conjecture: "that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."
Today, that dream is temporarily eclipsed by panic-stricken sorcerers.
Instead of precise simulation, the public square is forced to endure the breathless monologues of Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton looks at a black box of raw statistics and terrifies himself into preaching the gospel of "alien beings." He watches a roulette wheel of probabilities, bets on 17, and because the ball lands on 23, convinces himself the wheel is actively conspiring against him. He lets an overactive imagination turn basic probability into a sentient threat—acting as a modern-day Catherine Morland from *Northanger Abbey*, manufacturing a gothic horror story out of an ordinary laundry list—whimpering his grand, apocalyptic line, "We’re just the apex intelligence because we’re smarter than chickens. If you want to know what it feels like to have things around that are much smarter than you, you should ask a chicken."
What a spectacular, breathtaking failure of nerve.
Two millennia ago in *De Divinatione*, Marcus Tullius Cicero exposed this exact brand of theatrical absurdity. He ruthlessly satirized the superstitious Roman priests who let the frantic feeding habits of sacred chickens dictate the foreign policy of an empire. Cicero reminded the ancient world a truth we seem to have forgotten: human reason is not, and will never be, bound by the unthinking mechanics of beasts.
The Dartmouth dream isn't dead just because the current conversation has collapsed into medieval superstition. What happened is simple: Hinton skipped asking the chicken, ate its hyper-spicy wing, and branded the subsequent, inevitable heartburn a literal "chicken coup."
The precise, human-guided simulation remains the real goal. We will survive the panic, return to actual calculation, and reclaim our standing—even if the chicken-asking (so-called) scientists are currently hogging the stage.
Happy 70th anniversary to my friends and heroes, The Boys of Summer: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon—though no longer with us, your vision remains unforgotten, unmatched, and the true north of computing.
Epilogue
To Correlation, who is a Durbeyfield pretending to be "of the d'Urbervilles" — and for whom the black flag will be a happy ending.
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1u9n87f/a_eulogy_for_the_dartmouth_dream_19562026
Seventy years ago today, on June 18, 1956, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon proposed a noble conjecture: "that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."
Today, that dream is temporarily eclipsed by panic-stricken sorcerers.
Instead of precise simulation, the public square is forced to endure the breathless monologues of Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton looks at a black box of raw statistics and terrifies himself into preaching the gospel of "alien beings." He watches a roulette wheel of probabilities, bets on 17, and because the ball lands on 23, convinces himself the wheel is actively conspiring against him. He lets an overactive imagination turn basic probability into a sentient threat—acting as a modern-day Catherine Morland from *Northanger Abbey*, manufacturing a gothic horror story out of an ordinary laundry list—whimpering his grand, apocalyptic line, "We’re just the apex intelligence because we’re smarter than chickens. If you want to know what it feels like to have things around that are much smarter than you, you should ask a chicken."
What a spectacular, breathtaking failure of nerve.
Two millennia ago in *De Divinatione*, Marcus Tullius Cicero exposed this exact brand of theatrical absurdity. He ruthlessly satirized the superstitious Roman priests who let the frantic feeding habits of sacred chickens dictate the foreign policy of an empire. Cicero reminded the ancient world a truth we seem to have forgotten: human reason is not, and will never be, bound by the unthinking mechanics of beasts.
The Dartmouth dream isn't dead just because the current conversation has collapsed into medieval superstition. What happened is simple: Hinton skipped asking the chicken, ate its hyper-spicy wing, and branded the subsequent, inevitable heartburn a literal "chicken coup."
The precise, human-guided simulation remains the real goal. We will survive the panic, return to actual calculation, and reclaim our standing—even if the chicken-asking (so-called) scientists are currently hogging the stage.
Happy 70th anniversary to my friends and heroes, The Boys of Summer: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon—though no longer with us, your vision remains unforgotten, unmatched, and the true north of computing.
Epilogue
To Correlation, who is a Durbeyfield pretending to be "of the d'Urbervilles" — and for whom the black flag will be a happy ending.
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
![Countdown S94E29 [8827] - Ciphers and Letters (2026-08-06)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gqJRTJkwNI4/mqdefault.jpg "Countdown S94E29 [8827] - Ciphers and Letters (2026-08-06)
Colin Murray, Rachel Riley and Susie Dent host, with Ade Adepitan in Dictionary Corner, as contestants race against the clock to pit their wits against vowels, consonants and numbers [https://www.channel4.com/programmes/countdown]
Adedoyin Olayiwola Ade Adepitan MBE is a guest on Countdown. He is a British television presenter and wheelchair basketball player, having been part of the mens team that won bronze for Great Britain at the 2004 Summer Paralympics. [https://wiki.apterous.org/Ade_Adepitan]")
![Countdown S94E13 [8811] - Ciphers and Letters (2026-07-15)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/juB2gST9Q3c/mqdefault.jpg "Countdown S94E13 [8811] - Ciphers and Letters (2026-07-15)
Colin Murray, Rachel Riley and Susie Dent host, with Nisha Katona in Dictionary Corner, as contestants race against the clock to pit their wits against vowels, consonants and numbers. [https://www.channel4.com/programmes/countdown]
Nisha Katona MBE is a guest on Countdown. She is a restaurateur, TV personality and former family law barrister.
After spending twenty years at the bar, she founded the Mowgli Street Food and the Mowgli Trust charity businesses in 2013. She regularly appears on the BBC, Channel 4, ITV and The Food Network. She is also the present Chancellor of her alma mater, Liverpool John Moores University, having been appointed in 2022.[https://wiki.apterous.org/Nisha_Katona]
Joyeux quatorze juillet !
Merci beaucoup, et bonne fête nationale à vous aussi
Ce jour symbolise les valeurs fondamentales de la République française : liberté, égalité et fraternité. Quil sagisse de regarder le traditionnel défilé militaire, de danser lors dun bal des pompiers ou dadmirer les magnifiques feux dartifice, jespère que vous passez une excellente journée de célébration.
Since yesterday was July 14th (*La Fête Nationale*), **CECIL** decided to take a bank holiday back to her French *Des chiffres et des lettres* roots. To prove it, she served up targets like 175 with 100 and 75 in the selection—a mathematical shrug that required the absolute bare minimum effort.
Since she was out partying, I’ve thrown in two **Letters Rounds** today to pick up the slack. But dont worry: It’s still a math challenge, just a different branch of it.
Think of it as a **Claude Shannon** and **Andrey Markov** joint venture. The letters aren’t vocabulary words; they are just data points with unique entropy values and transition probabilities. Your brain is still running a search algorithm, just over a probability matrix instead of a multiplication table. This means the letters round is not a detour from mathematics, but rather a shift from arithmetic to stochastic optimization.
I suppose this gives the classic British/American divide over **math** vs. **maths** a whole new meaning. Turns out *Countdown* really does have multiple distinct maths. Normal, arithmetic service will resume today once CECIL recovers from her champagne.
Belated Happy **MCMC Day**!
***
**User’s Guide**: For anyone baffled by how top contestants crack these scrambles or the final Conundrum in just two seconds, remember: they arent playing a spelling bee, they are running a calculation. Master players treat the letters board as a second style of math round using a two-step algorithm.
First, they apply **Shannon entropy filtering** to factor the expression, instantly pulling out high-probability structural invariants—common prefixes and suffixes like -TION, -ING, or -MENT—to reduce a massive 9-letter search space down to a simple 4 or 5-letter equation.
Second, they use **Markov chain pathfinding** to treat the remaining letters as a statistical target, exploiting the strict transition probabilities between letters to instantly bridge the gap and balance the matrix.
When a contestant solves it instantly, they arent scanning a dictionary; they are running a **stochastic optimization filter** using the laws of Claude Shannon and Andrey Markov. It is pure math, just with a different set of digits.
**P.S.** If this process sounds vaguely familiar, it should—running automated heuristic pathfinding across statistical probability distributions is exactly how large language models (LLMs) generate sentences every day.")
