An ‘All Souls Examination’ of the machine

Within Silicon Valley software circles, the examination most feared and revered is probably the Putnam Competition. It is a mathematical test for college students, with MIT students taking first place in the past three years. Winning it puts you in the company of Nobel Prize winners, marks you a shape rotator par excellence. Across the pond, in the damp green of Oxford University, there’s another “hardest exam in the world”. It’s called the All Souls Fellowship exam and has a candidate write twelve essays across two days on surprising topics.

The just two successful candidates are made Fellows and provided, for seven years, with tuition and accommodation paid in full plus an annual stipend. In 1919, T. E. Lawrence took it and passed. Derek Parfit passed it in 1974 (five years before women could apply).

Now, if your heart was set on the software industry and you could only win the Putnam or the All Souls prize, you’d definitely be best winning the former. Software engineers are most impressed by proof and calculation. And it’s true that you cannot build a software company out of prose and debate. But we still love the tech essay. Paul Graham, hacker painter and startup royal, is its patron saint. And while the industry builds in code, bits and bytes, it still largely thinks about itself with essays.

I came across sample questions from the All Souls examination online and it felt like a peek behind the curtain, a visit into the world of the truly well educated. They were having fun. I understood the questions, and they were almost all zany but grounded in the ‘real world’—that place occupied by nurses and plumbers and coders, not perma-cloistered elite academics.

• Why is a leather jacket more acceptable than a fur coat?
• Were the COVID lockdowns a legitimate use of state power?
• Should we be Bayesians?
• Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?

(All real questions from recent exams.)

In the spirit of this All Souls fun, I’ll contribute below a series of essay questions under the subject of Software. They’re all questions I’d like to answer myself, should I ever find the time. I’d love to read responses, if any are written. Haven’t we all read enough essays on static vs. dynamic types?

1. Can a computer be beautiful?
2. Are software engineers real engineers?
3. The value of a software system is contained not in its instantiation but in the knowledge gained by those who built it. Discuss.¹
4. “Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world” (McLuhan, 1964). Is man here as a parent is to a child or a bee to a flower?
5. What, if anything, should be done about the ‘obesity epidemic’ in software? (software bloat)

As implicitly directed by the All Souls exam administrators: go forth and have fun with it.