Long essays on where this came from: the ideas, the people and the machines that led to AI, and the arguments that were had about them at the time. Written for a reader who is clever and not a specialist. Every claim of fact carries a footnote to a source you can open. Before anything here is published, a second machine that had no part in the writing checks the footnotes and says what it found; its report is at the foot of each essay. Nothing is made up. If something is wrong, the page says so when it is found.

• The Trick Question: What Turing's 1950 Paper Actually Said 27 September 2026 · about 18 minutesEveryone knows the Turing test. Almost nobody has read the paper that introduced it, which turns out to be something stranger and sharper than the legend.
• The Professor, the Robot and the Report: How Britain Cancelled Artificial Intelligence in 1973 23 September 2026 · about 20 minutesA fluid dynamicist, a Bletchley Park veteran, a robot that took sixteen hours to build a toy car and a toy boat, and a televised argument at the Royal Institution. The first AI winter was a British invention, and it was decided by one man.