5 JAN 2026

Day 5

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

John Locke · An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

A rectangular wooden game board inlaid with shell and lapis lazuli, divided into twenty squares arranged in three sections: two blocks of six squares on each end and a narrow bridge of eight squares connecting them, with rosette patterns marking five of the squares.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Royal Game of Ur

Sumerian · c. 2600 BC · ME 120834

Carved shell and lapis lazuli mark the track of a game played in Ur four and a half millennia ago. The rules survived on a clay tablet dated 2,400 years later.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Gradient Descent

Foundations · Iterative optimisation · Billions of parameters

Training a model means walking downhill in a space with more dimensions than atoms in your body. The metaphor of a landscape is a three-dimensional cartoon of something that has no spatial form at all.

Enter lesson 7 MIN

A vellum page filled almost entirely by an ornate monogram in ink and pigment. The letters are formed from spirals, interlace and geometric panels in yellow, red, blue, green and purple. Small animal forms are visible within the decoration.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Book of Kells

c. 800 · Pigment on vellum · Trinity College, Dublin

The Book of Kells' Chi Rho page devotes an entire vellum sheet to two Greek letters, with decoration so minutely detailed that scholars still debate whether it was made for magnification.

Enter lesson 7 MIN