An ‘All Souls Examination’ of the machine

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2025-01-12 02:00:13

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.