The Long Detour: Three Part Book Series on Pre-GPU and Low-Compute ML

A new three-part book series on pre-GPU and low-compute machine learning has been published, drafted by a multi-agent AI system that verified every fact against primary sources and reproduced experiments. The 176,659-word work covers historical ML milestones like CMU's 1976 HARPY speech system and includes 398 executed experiments, with all construction data publicly available on GitHub.

▶ watch it being written replay.html — the tape, all 13,539 events, replayed HARPY · SPEECH UNDERSTANDING · CMU 1976 VOCABULARY ......... 1,011 WORDS NETWORK STATES ..... 15,000 COMPILE TIME ....... OVER 13 HRS, DEC-10 KL THROUGHPUT ......... 80 X REAL-TIME PROCESSOR .......... 0.35 MIPS PDP-KA10 STATUS ............. IT WORKED. This book was drafted, revised, and fact-checked by an event-sourced multi-agent system — an author, an adversarial critic, a planner, and an arbiter — working over a corpus of ~5,000 primary papers, directed and assembled by its human author. Nothing here rests on trust in the process: the process is published. Every sentence traces to logged reads of the primary sources; every quotation was machine-verified verbatim against the paper it cites; every number in an experimental rerun comes from an executed, independently reproduced computation; and the full construction record — the tape — replays to exactly this text. | Words | 176,659 | | Sections | 117 | | Construction events on the tape | 13,539 | | Executed experiments | 398 | | Critiques filed and resolved | 175 | Preprint, text only — figures are forthcoming. Source, tape, lab, and harness: github.com/doInfinitely/long-detour https://github.com/doInfinitely/long-detour . Even the jacket keeps receipts: the cover concepts and the design transcript https://github.com/doInfinitely/long-detour/blob/main/transcript-cover-design-onward.md are in the repository, including the quote check that caught a mocked-up cover inventing archival telemetry. Jacket copy passes the same quote check as the prose.